Post
A game so bad they buried millions of copies in the New Mexico desert, and decades later, someone dug them up to prove it.
Atari paid $21 million for the E.T. movie license in 1982 and gave developer Howard Scott Warshaw just five and a half weeks to build the game in time for Christmas. The result was a confusing mess where players fell into pits repeatedly with no clear objective. Atari manufactured millions of cartridges expecting a blockbuster, but returns flooded in faster than sales. The game became shorthand for everything wrong with the pre-crash industry: greed, rushed development, and blind faith that a brand name alone could sell anything. In 2014, a documentary crew actually excavated the Alamogordo landfill and found the buried cartridges, confirming gaming's most famous urban legend.
Example
Howard Scott Warshaw had previously made Yars' Revenge, one of Atari's best games, in the same timeframe. But E.T.'s game design was so rushed that the core loop (falling into pits and levitating out) was essentially the only mechanic. Stores accepted more returns of E.T. than they had originally ordered.
Why it matters
E.T. became the poster child for the 1983 crash and a permanent cautionary tale about what happens when executives prioritize release dates over playability. Every time a game ships broken today, someone invokes E.T.
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