It's been a long-running urban legend - Atari dumped over a million cartridges of the videogame E.T - The Extra-Terrestrial in a landfill in New Mexico because the videogame was so terrible. Turns out, it's actually true. A documentary on the history of Atari is in the works and, as part of the research for it, a landfill in New Mexico was excavated to see if there was any truth to the rumour.
The videogame - which truly is awful - was a massive flop for Atari and set the famed videogame company on the path to destruction. Atari reportedly manufactured something close to 3.5 million cartridges of the game and almost ALL of them were returned. When the company posted massive losses that year in 1983, the manufacturing plant in Texas was shut down and upwards of $10 million in unsold equipment, videogames and inventory was dumped in a nearby landfill.
Researchers for the documentary also discovered that some of the cartridges they'd excavated from the landfill were, believe it or not, still usable and in reasonably good condition. Here's a little taste of what the game was actually like.
