The Cutprice Guignol

Ever heard of a game so bad that they had to bury it – literally?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to the 1982 video game adaptation of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game that failed so dismally that thousands of copies were buried in a landfill. Let’s talk about one of gaming’s most infamous flops, and the urban legend that turned out to be (partially) true!

In the summer of 1982, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was one of the biggest blockbusters on the market – pulling in nearly $800 million from a $10 million budget, the story of childhood, acceptance, and intergalactic friendship proved one of the most potent combinations wide-release cinema had ever seen (well, if you’re willing to overlook that the titular alien was specifically designed to give nightmares to me personally, but I digress). Distributors Universal Studios saw the potential for further profit in tie-in merchandise – including this legendarily badly-conceived finger light that was soon pulled from shelves for obvious reasons – and licensed the story for a potential video game adaptation just a few weeks after the film was released in June. A brief but intense bidding war took place to acquire the rights, and, eventually, Atari landed the license to produce an E.T. video game for a hefty $20 million in the last week of July.

The only problem was that buzz around the film was so intense that Atari wanted to get the game out in time for the Christmas season that year – in order for the game to go to manufacturing in time for the November-December shopping period, it would need to be completed by September 1st. With just five and a half weeks to turn the game around, Atari assigned it to Howard Scott Warshaw, who had previously worked on the Raiders of the Lost Ark video game, another Spielberg blockbuster adaptation that had been moderately well-received.

The turnaround time would have been a tough enough challenge in its own right, but, as Warshaw discussed in an interview years later, E.T. offered the specific challenge of being a more sentimental and emotional story than those standard for the adventure game format at the time – “the whole thing with E.T.,” he remarked. “Was sentiment.”. Warshaw, however, created six and a half thousand lines of original code, and Jerome Domurat created hundreds of unique graphics to bring the game to life.

The game was a simple top-down game that followed E.T. as he collected pieces of a telephone in order to phone home and make it back to his home planet; occasionally, he faces interference from FBI agents or scientists “who’ll do heaven knows what if they get their hands on him!” according to an advert promoting the game. After the rushed turnaround, the game was prepared for release in late 1982, and was met with high anticipation after the success of the movie.

And, despite claims that the game’s reputation as one of the worst of all time, contemporary reviews were, for the most part, lukewarm at worst – a review roundup on Video Game History shows that most surviving reviews took issues with the limited graphics, a difficult section that saw players plunging into pits over and over again, and a difficulty level that might leave all but the youngest players rather bored. Clarence Petersen, writing for the Chicago Tribune, has probably my favourite review, as he noted that “in three hours of play, not once could I…get (E.T.) safely aboard the lightship before his time ran out and the poor thing lay dead on the color TV screen.”.

Perhaps more impactful on the game’s reputation is the financial hit Atari took in producing it. Enthused about the potential for the game’s success, Atari produced around 5 million physical copies of the E.T. game, selling around 1.5 million in the first few months of its release – however, more than half a million copies were returned, with some stores insisting on more robust return policies for oversold video games in the aftermath. Some joked at the time that Atari had produced more E.T. cartridges than they had sold consoles; whatever the reason, they wildly overestimated the popularity of their Christmas release, and were left with millions of copies of a game that seemed to have fallen swiftly out of public favour.

How to deal with this? Dumping them in a landfill, of course. E.T. was not the only game that Atari had vastly overestimated – a port of Pac-Man had failed similarly in early 1982, and Atari found itself with thousands of returned and unsold cartridges that had to be disposed of. In September 1983, eleven semi-trucks packed with Atari consoles and games – including the E.T. cartridges – were spotted funnelling from an Atari storage facility in El Paso, Texas to a landfill just outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. An article in the Alamogordo reported that Atari declined to confirm or deny the reports, though, when the story reached the New York Times, it was eventually confirmed that the facility was being turned into a recycling plant and the contents were being disposed of to make space for the new equipment. In an unusual turn, concrete was poured over the disposed goods, ostensibly to keep looters from rooting through them and getting hurt, though some speculated that Atari were literally trying to bury talk of their recent failures.

The matter of the buried Atari goods soon moved from newspaper pages into urban legend – a kind of cautionary tale about overzealous corporate production. Various references to the tomb of Atari in Alamogordo popped up in books, movies, and TV shows over the following decades, but it wasn’t until 2013 – thirty years after they were originally buried – that they finally saw the light of day again. A documentary, Atari: Game Over, covering the legend of the buried games, served as the impetus for the local council of Alamogordo to dig in the area for a single day, and, in April 2013, director Zak Penn announced to gathered crowds that they had struck video game gold.

Around 700,000 cartridges were discovered in the dump site, including several thousand copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; while the game was not the only one buried in the pit, it was perhaps the most notable, given its legendary status as a lost gaming artefact. A few were rescued and took up residence in various pop culture museums, with the urban legend proving to be one of the few with some actual validity behind it.

The E.T. video game is an infamous part of gaming history – an urban legend that turned out to be somewhat true, and a warning to any corporations looking to rush out mediocre products with the intent of scoring big on the seasonal market. If it’s one you played when it came out, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below – or if there are other games out there that you think should be tossed into the (proverbial or literal) video game pit.

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(header image via BBC)