E.T. widely condemned as the “worst game ever made”
I’ve always believed it to be one of those random rumours that the Internet throws up ocassionally, but now it seems that Atari really did bin tens of thousands of copies of their ill-fated E.T. video game back in the 1980′s.
In 1982, E.T: The Extra Terrestrial was a huge hit in cinemas worldwide. As a result, Atari commissioned a cartridge video game for their Atari 2600 console system.
Unfortunately, they rushed the game through development in just 5 weeks, and the result was a game that was buggy, difficult and, well, just rubbish really.
As a result, Atari were rumoured to have dumped thousands of brand new copies of the title in to a New Mexico land fill, rather than pay for them to sit in storage for a large amount of time.
Fast forward to 2014, and a film production team making a documentary about the events has exhumed the land fill and found evidence that thousands of brand new games really were dumped in the desert.
Jeff Rubenstein tweeted the photo above, exclaiming that after a day in the desert, the exhumed cartridge was probably in better condition than he was.
Quite what will happen with the recovered cartridges is not clear at this point, though I know a few people that would like to lay their hands on one.