by ted2112, HSM team writer

One of the biggest urban legends in gaming has to be the rumor of the secret burial of millions of copies of the video game E.T., somewhere in the New Mexico desert.

To understand the story you have to go back to what gaming was in 1983 — specifically, the state of the industry at large. Atari was king of the gaming world, yet teetering on the edge of a massive fall. There wasn’t even a close second in the console market at the time, and the legendary Atari 2600 console was pumping out cheap content and terrible movie tie-in games faster than you could say “Pathetic Pac-Man port.”  The console was selling like virtual hot cakes since 1977, but was about to be a victim of its own success.

In what has become known as the Video Game Crash of 1983, Atari — who had doubled down on the continuing success of the console — was hemorrhaging money to the tune of $10,000 per day. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $24,000 today. There are many reasons why the 2600 crashed, such as the the brief foray into computers and an R&D department that never seemed to actually research and develop a video game — but the main reason, I feel, was gamers were just burnt out on a massive pile of junk titles from third-party developers that was available for the 2600.

Perhaps the biggest and most legendary dud of them all was E.T.

E.T. was released in December 1982, after only a five-and-a-half-week rush job to make. Seriously. The game, from beginning  to release, was about a month and a half. Needless to say, the game was terrible on an epic scale, and considered to this day as the biggest commercial failure in video gaming history. It originally sold for $49.95, which adjusted for inflation was about $140, making it a very expensive video game, and priced out of many people’s budgets. This price didn’t last long, however; after hugely disappointing sales, the game could be picked up for about buck in many retail outlets just several months later.

E.T. led to a $536,000,000 loss in 1983 for Atari, and started the dominos falling that led to the demise of the company itself. Atari, the once mighty engine of gaming started by Nolan Bushnell himself, went through a frantic restructuring phase that in the end couldn’t save it from itself.  E.T. did, however, have a silver lining in the gaming industry: retailers demanded a return policy on unsold games that led to a huge quality improvement in video games, and future console makers like Nintendo and Sony would keep development of games very controlled.

All of this leads us to the remote desert of New Mexico.

The New York Times reported in 1983 that fourteen tractor trailer loads of E.T and other unsold Atari video games were driven from the Atari factory in El Paso, Texas, north to the isolated town of Alamogordo — outside Roswell, New Mexico — and buried the whole lot. Whether it was cheaper to bury the games, rather that storing them or destroying them, remains a mystery to this day. I do find it quite amusing that technology about an alien from outer space was secretly buried near the UFO capital of  the world. Whether this was a coincidence or a gamer’s sense of humor, all we really know is that the games were literally removed from the face of the Earth.

Just this last month, director Zak Penn (of Avengers fame) visited the alleged site as part of an upcoming documentary he’s working on, and started to dig. In a funny parallel to Raiders of the Lost Ark’s historic archaeological dig, it seems that he has found them. Again for the time being, the shroud of mystery has been pulled over the subject and we will all have to wait for the documentary to see what happens.  I can’t wait to see gaming’s most urban legend revealed.

Drake from Uncharted would be proud.

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One Response to “Finding E.T.”

1. Danger_Dad says:

   May 2, 2014 at 11:14 pm

   :^/ Truth continues, stranger than fiction.

   Reply