When you’re a great video game, you’re praised for innovation and immersion, and given high scores and top rankings by gaming magazine editors. When you’re a bad video game, you’re sneered at by the geek masses and gather dust on Wal-Mart’s shelves. But when you’re considered the worst video game ever made, you get taken out to the desert in the middle of the night, buried in a landfill, covered in concrete for good measure… and hopefully forgotten.
At least that’s what happened to 1982’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial… well, minus the memory lapse.
Created by Atari for its 2600 gaming console, E.T. the game was supposed to cash in on the success of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie about a squishy-looking alien trying to make a long-distance call. But, according to the story, Atari — which was the dominant player in the growing video game industry at the time — apparently took too long to secure rights to the character and, with pressing production schedules, only gave one designer a few scant weeks to write, design, create and test the game in time for the Christmas rush.
Yeah, that seems like a perfectly logical recipe for success, right?
As you might expect, the title totally flopped, and was supposedly plagued with game-breaking bugs. Some critics have called it “the worst game ever made.” It’s long been postulated that the game’s failure was one of the reasons Atari lost its market dominance.
Now, a lot of bad games have been made over the years, but most of them have faded from memory and only pop up from time to time as geeky in-jokes on Internet forums or on lists of obscure titles. But E.T. the game became the stuff of myth, because for decades a story has circulated about an “Atari Graveyard” where supposedly thousands of these game cartridges were secretly buried.
Hey, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. Or maybe “they” want you to believe that everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. It could be a conspiracy theory inside a conspiracy theory, wrapped in an enigma… and um, coated in rich creamy caramel and milk chocolate.
Anyway, the legend proved to be true this week when a crew of documentary filmmakers making a movie about the failed game actually found the fabled burial site in a New Mexico landfill. Apparently some 14 truckloads of cartridges were shipped to the desert site, buried and then covered in concrete to discourage scavengers from digging up the games. Why Atari chose to get rid of the game like a Mafia stool pigeon is part of the urban legend and heated speculation on Internet blogs and forums. The upcoming documentary aims to shed light on the story behind the game’s failure and subsequent legendary and mysterious desert burial.
Whatever the real story, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial will remain a part of gaming history for both its colossal, unmatched failure, and its strange and storied desert disposal… or at least that’s what “they” want you to think.
It could all just be a conspiracy.
