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It has been rumored for years that Atari dumped a huge amount of the epically flawed ET video game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. This Urban Legend has now been proven to be true. A documentary film crew got permission to dig up the landfill and they found hundreds of the Atari ET cartridges.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/diggers-ready-unearth-ataris-et-games-0

On second thought, let's not go to Alamogordo. It is a silly place.

Lol what, I have never heard of this before.

Esproc wrote:

Lol what, I have never heard of this before.

Do you know what an Atari 2600 or VCS is?

This is like finding the Loch Ness monster. This story went around -- back in the days before web, when it had to go word-of-mouth abetted by the occasional obscure magazine -- but nobody was ever sure if it was true.

I love that one of the current city officials was, back in 1983, one of the kids who snuck in to the dump to scavenge some of the carts.

On a related note: I had a VCS (the original 6-switch heavy model, before it got called the 2600) and I actually found the Easter Egg in Adventure on my own, entirely by accident.

UberGerbil wrote:

This is like finding the Loch Ness monster. This story went around -- back in the days before web, when it had to go word-of-mouth abetted by the occasional obscure magazine -- but nobody was ever sure if it was true.

I love that one of the current city officials was, back in 1983, one of the kids who snuck in to the dump to scavenge some of the carts.

On a related note: I had a VCS (the original 6-switch heavy model, before it got called the 2600) and I actually found the Easter Egg in Adventure on my own, entirely by accident.

I remember reading about this years and years ago and even then I was leaning towards believing the story.

This has to be one of the coolest stories that I have heard so far this year. I also heard a few years ago that Atari 2600 cartridges (especially E.T.) were buried at an undisclosed location or locations back in the 1980's. I never actually doubted the story but it's good to have this confirmation that the rumor is true. I myself owned an Atari 2600 from 1981 up until about 1985 when I sold it with all of my games. I bought E.T. not long after it came out and didn't like it and returned it to the store. At first they didn't want to accept the return at all but in the end they allowed me to exchange it for another game at the same price point. About a year later as I recall, I had second thoughts and decided to buy the game again at a heavily discounted price. Funny thing, I actually liked it.

Anyway, this is a great trip down memory lane and I hope they can find more stuff and release more pictures.

Khali wrote:

Atari dumped a huge amount of the epically flawed ET video game cartridges

The only flaw was that the game royally sucked and they couldn't sell them. If you never had the misfortune of playing the game--and believe me, if you did you would, for some unknown reason, continue to play--you need only watch some gameplay videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPnmewxetNA

curtisb wrote:

Khali wrote:

Atari dumped a huge amount of the epically flawed ET video game cartridges

The only flaw was that the game royally sucked and they couldn't sell them. If you never had the misfortune of playing the game--and believe me, if you did you would, for some unknown reason, continue to play--you need only watch some gameplay videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPnmewxetNA

Oh yes I remember very well how bad it was. I did not have the Atari 2600 myself. I had the Sears Video Arcade version of the Atari 2600. I played that thing for years before finally selling it for a small fortune to a guy that wanted the cartridges but took the console as part of the deal. I had some where around 250 to 275 games. Many of which I got at the local Revco drug store out of the clearance rack for little bit of nothing. I made enough off those games to buy my first car for $3500. You could get a pretty nice used car in the late 80's for $3500 so it seemed like a deal to me at the time.

This game really wasn't *that* bad. Frustrating, yes, but not bad. At least it had an ending, unlike most games of the era, which were impossible to win.

curtisb wrote:

Khali wrote:

Atari dumped a huge amount of the epically flawed ET video game cartridges

The only flaw was that the game royally sucked and they couldn't sell them. If you never had the misfortune of playing the game--and believe me, if you did you would, for some unknown reason, continue to play--you need only watch some gameplay videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPnmewxetNA

thanx, now i gotta flush my eyes with bleach, again

I owned ET for the 2600 as a kid. My parents got us one of the smaller Atari 2600 systems when I was 6, right after the big crash, along with a bunch of games at the local Big Lots for like $5 each. ET was one of my favorites. Then again, I was 6.

That gameplay video is missing the government agents that would steal your phone parts. It's not like it had no enemies or wasn't hard (or couldn't be hard, at least)

This fellow hacked ET's binary code to fix the worst problems. He provides a final ROM for downloading if you don't want to follow along with how he did it:
http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

I had a 2600 in my dorm room that I liked to play instead of going to class. I remember ET well, mostly for it being a pretty sub-par game, even for its time. By the time ET came out, there were already some excellent games from Activision that had already been released (Pitfall and River Raid), so it was apparent that the 2600 was capable of far finer work than ET. Even Atari had released far better games, like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Swamp wrote:

I had a 2600 in my dorm room that I liked to play instead of going to class. I remember ET well, mostly for it being a pretty sub-par game, even for its time. By the time ET came out, there were already some excellent games from Activision that had already been released (Pitfall and River Raid), so it was apparent that the 2600 was capable of far finer work than ET. Even Atari had released far better games, like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

We had one of those when I was young, couldn't afford many games though. Atari 2600 had a processor from same family as chip used in Apple ][, Commodore Vic-20 and C64 that I learned on. I knew that but had to look it up... It was a 6507, limited to 8kB addressable memory. I think it drew the screen one raster line at a time. It didn't have the more advance sprite generator in the Commodore, but should have been able to do some fairly neat stuff.

River Raid? That game is so overrated. It's a brainless top-down shooter. Pitfall, sure. That was a great platformer for it's day. Sorry, ET>River Raid.