E.T. for the Atari 2600 essentially caused the crash of the Western games market, but now it and other unburied Atari games are going on display.
E.T. the Fall is the title of a new exhibit at The Video Game Museum of Rome (or VIGAMUS), dedicated to the unearthed games found in Alamogordo, New Mexico’s infamous (and until recently, rumored) “Atari Tomb”. What’s the Atari tomb, you ask?
Have you ever heard anything about an urban legend concerning the E.T. Atari 2600 cartridges being buried in a desert somewhere?
Turns out, that’s not an urban legend.
VIGAMUS has decided to get their hands on some of these forsaken cartridges, and are planning to give them the exhibit they deserve.
Yeah, I said DESERVE. E.T. has become so much more than just a testament to what’s wrong with gaming, it’s become iconic to gaming culture, as has the urban legend surrounding it. It’s representative of everything that makes gaming great; our ability to appreciate the horrid and putrid and learn from it. Without E.T.’s grand blunder, as Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw asks, would we still have the Japanese game/anime boom of the 90’s?
I think we owe much of our current gaming culture and collective constructive cynicism to this abomination, and for that I thank E.T. and look forward to not having enough dough to see the exhibit in person, but still having enough to pay the internet bull so I can live vicariously through the photos.
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