Video Game Mythbusters: Digging Up E.T. Cartridges in Desert Edition

     On Saturday, one of life's great mysteries was solved. E.T. cartridges were unearthed in the desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Filming for an upcoming documentary, XBox Entertainment Studios, along with Fuel Entertainment, hired a excavation crew to go out to into the site and attempt to dig up where the cartridges were supposedly buried. There's not a complete number of how many E.T. cartridges are buried. So, far they have found a few hundred copies and are still digging to find more. The tale of Atari burying millions of E.T. cartridges in the middle of the desert one of the great urban legends of video games, if the not the king of video game urban legends being referenced and the talk of gamers for years.

     For those who haven't heard of the urban myth, set back and I will tell you the tale. Once upon a time E.T. came out in a June in the year of 1982 and it was good. It became a blockbuster hit debuting at #1 with a gross over 11 million and stayed at the top spot for seven weeks. E.T. became the highest grossing movie of all time with $359 million until it was dethroned by another Steven Spielberg film, Jurassic Park in 1993. With a hit movie, it's only right to further cash in on its success with a potentially hit game right? Atari secured the rights to make the game in July 1982, giving its designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, five months to make the game as they wanted it to be released for the Christmas season.

     E.T. the Game came out as planned in December and it was bad. Actually, it was horrible. Due to Atari wanting the game to be released for the holiday season, it was rushed leaving an incomplete and buggy mess. According to Warshaw it took five weeks to make the game. The game started off strong, but after word of mouth on how bad it was and negative reviews, sales dropped and the game became what is considered to the biggest failure in video game history and one of the contributors in the video game crash in 1983. Atari suffered hard in losses. E.T. the game sold 1.5 units and made $25 million in sales, but left Atari with $100 million  loss and 3.5 million cartridges that nobody wanted to buy. The only solution Atari had was to bury the unsold copies in a landfill in the middle of the desert and try to recover. E.T. the Game was a pioneer, not only being the first of its kind, video game/movie tie-ins, but also the trend of them sucking.