Huh. So it turns out that the whole Atari burying a gazillion E.T cartridges in the desert thing was true.
One of the E.T cartridges exhumed from its sandy grave after 30 years in the New Mexico desert.
This is actually pretty cool. Apart from the bit where that mug Major Nelson from Xbox was there. Probably telling bystanders why Xbox Ones initial game ownership policy was awesome. Tssk!
Apparently the whole dig will be covered in depth in a documentary about the history of Atari or something. Could be interesting. Although it’s clear Grig Orig obviously had a hand in this discovery. Plainly inspired by our recent review of E.T on PS1, it’s good to know some savvy Greader (that’s Grig reader, by the by) was spurred to action by taking up his shovel after finishing our article and, with the words of Wilton Knight ringing in his ears, proved that one man can indeed make a difference.
And thus, the legend was shown to be true.
Coincidence? I think not!
Dibbs out.
I saw this sucker on tumblr and it was just so random I kept trying to work out why someone would hoax this. But it came up a few times so …
It’s kinda sad, but I did actually find this whole thing very interesting. I actually wrote about the landfill dumping in a college project in 1998 so it was pretty cool to see what they found.
Course the new replacement conspiracy is that the whole thing was faked by Microsoft for their show, so the mystery of the legend looks set to live on!
It is TOTALLY interesting – you know, even if you weren’t into games this is a weird interesting story. Cos the version I heard is they thought it was so bad they just ditched all the copies (wait – do you actually also say that above? I can’t look cos I’m on iPhone…) but how crazy is that?! Why not just sell them and see?! Must have been sad for the developers – some of the copies they found had been signed. They obviously still cared…
i once heard that they made more copies than they had consoles, but that can’t be true surely? unless its because they only had one chance of manufacturing the game and thought long term, which didn’t turn out so good for atari.
its been nearly a year since this the documentary was announced but i haven’t heard when we can expect it, anybody?
I only heard it was this year. Along with the AVGN movie which has a lot to do with the legend of this game. Hope the fact that they went and dug them up doesn’t detract from James Rolfes movie. Looked fun.
There’s so much folklore with this game, but one thing I heard was that they made so many of them because they thought it would be a system seller, so they wanted to make sure there were enough to go around by making more copies than their current install base. Think I read earlier they made 5 million of copies but only sold 1.5 million, and most of those people were grigged off by how bad it was. Guess that didnt quite work out how they expected!
there’s another video game movie thing on the kickstarter last year that should be this year, they take a long time to come out, I think indie game the movie was like 2-3 years