E.T. Found In New Mexico Landfill 179
skipkent sends this news from Kotaku:
"One of the most infamous urban legends in video games has turned out to be true. Digging in Alamogordo, New Mexico today, excavators discovered cartridges for the critically-panned Atari game E.T., buried in a landfill way back in 1983 after Atari couldn't figure out what else to do with their unsold copies. For decades, legend had it that Atari put millions of E.T. cartridges in the ground, though some skeptics have wondered whether such an extraordinary event actually happened. Last year, Alamogordo officials finally approved an excavation of the infamous landfill, and plans kicked into motion two weeks ago, with Microsoft partnering up with a documentary team to dig into the dirt and film the results. Today, it's official. They've found E.T.'s home—though it's unclear whether there are really millions or even thousands of copies down there."
Why, God, why? (Score:5, Funny)
ET's not that bad. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ET's not that bad. (Score:5, Funny)
Randomly getting stuck in a pit with no way out was fun? Or every screen being identical? Yeah I know 1983 graphics were not great but damn, at least make them different colors or something. Even at four or five years old I knew that game was a bucket of fail.
It's not random (Score:3)
Re:It's not random (Score:4)
I remember Solaris even if vaguely. That was a tough game. I remember you would have to conquer solar systems and move to others which were progressively more difficult. I remember that after a certain point the controls were all reversed: at that young age I was done, I kept screwing up when I got that far. My older brother was able to keep going but that was still a tough game -- but not dumb bugs like ET which was basically unfinished.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was also tough. If I remember correctly you had to solve a bunch of puzzles and collect artifacts all before nightfall when the door to the city closed and you were stuck with lethal enemies. I remember the tsetse flies being one-touch lethal. I never could beat that game either.
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Solaris (and Solaris doesn't count, it's a 16k cartridge, the larges the 2600 ever
"Solaris is hot and Midnight Magic's Mean"
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(and Solaris doesn't count, it's a 16k cartridge, the larges the 2600 ever had) :)
Actually Fatal Run was 32K and the Brazilian trivia game Mega Boy was 64K.
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Randomly getting stuck in a pit with no way out was fun? Or every screen being identical?
Are you sure you are not talking about pitfall? I never did figure out that game. It was a giant loop
where you jumped over pits, etc... but didn't seem to have any objective or ending.
Re:ET's not that bad. (Score:5, Informative)
To make matters worse, the 'hard core' gamers that might have appreciated the game had moved on to the C64/Apple II where they already had 2 Ultima games to compare E.T. to.
Then the final nail in the coffin was the level of hype put on the game due to the movie left people completely let down.
Re:ET's not that bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was a callow ant, I got this game for Christmas from my parents IIRC. I was all :) to get this game because I enjoyed the movie in the theater. I never understood how to play it like most people. My older friend did and told me how. It wasn't too bad. Not a great game. There are worse games like these: http://www.deafsparrow.com/201... [deafsparrow.com] ...
Re:ET's not that bad. (Score:5, Funny)
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Wait, you mean you have to put the cartridge into an Atari 2600?
No wonder I had so much trouble beating the game.
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The biggest waste is that once ET finally makes it home, it turns out he's not really wanted there anyways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Yes, Yes it was that bad (Score:2)
Speaking as someone who solved the game without the instructions; I can say with certitude that it was the most godawful thing I have ever played. If this thing had a budget of a few hundred dollars, I wouldn't have minded, but the rights alone COST $25 MILLION DOLLARS. To put this in perspective the budget of the E.T. Film was 10.5 Million Dollars.
Re:Yes, Yes it was that bad (Score:4, Informative)
The game was incredibly hyped up - every game magazine was talking about it as if the messiah was about to return. One of the problems was that the cartridge box art was way ahead of what the console systems could do. On every game, everyone expected the graphics to really look like the box art. Then you'd find the game levels were usually a black rectangle surrounded by colored walls with a few obstacles and some scrolling.
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So it was in the spirit of the movie in one way, then. I absolutely refused to see it when it came out because I was already sick of hearing about it.
I don't think I saw it till around 95 or 96. I was working away, there was a long weekend and absolutely sod all else on the TV.
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Every Atari game had fancy box art. None of the games looked remotely like the boxes. Nobody who owned more than one Atari game would have had an issue with the game's look.
Re:ET's not that bad. (Score:5, Informative)
I liked the game too as a kid. It had its shortcomings which by the way are all addressed here. ET is no longer an awful game:
http://www.neocomputer.org/pro... [neocomputer.org]
Re: ET's not that bad. (Score:2)
Re:Why, God, why? (Score:4, Interesting)
not that there's much use for them now, to be sure - but as a kid, this was one of those games I spent hours and hours and hours on trying to beat... I had always thought it was me not being able to figure it out (I had no way of knowing otherwise, really) and only now am I aware, because of articles like these, that it was practically unbeatable due to its shoddy planning. As for the quality, it was what it was, and it wasn't really any worse than the other games available for the 2600 at the time, so I didn't really know the difference. I liked it because it made me think about strategy in ways I hadn't otherwise yet learned at 8 years old, it taught me planning because I mapped out on paper some of the puzzle piece locations so I could try and find a pattern (sorta like D&D, even though I was never allowed to play that), and most of all because it certainly taught me patience beyond my years. I look back fondly at the E.T. game - not for the gameplay, but for what I learned as a young gamer because of what I now know are its flaws.
But yes, now that they're there in the ground, no real reason to dig them up - they're not going to be worth anything and all it really does is waste time and money to verify an "urban legend". Big whoop.
Re:Why, God, why? (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the quality, it was what it was, and it wasn't really any worse than the other games available for the 2600 at the time, so I didn't really know the difference. I liked it because it made me think about strategy in ways I hadn't otherwise yet learned at 8 years old, it taught me planning because I mapped out on paper some of the puzzle piece locations so I could try and find a pattern (sorta like D&D, even though I was never allowed to play that), and most of all because it certainly taught me patience beyond my years. I look back fondly at the E.T. game - not for the gameplay, but for what I learned as a young gamer because of what I now know are its flaws.
You forgot the most important lesson, sometimes no matter what you do or think you could have done differently you're fucked because you're set up to fail. That's important to remember when the project you're on fails miserably and the crap rolls downhill, of course assuming you weren't the screw-up.
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You forgot the most important lesson, sometimes no matter what you do or think you could have done differently you're fucked because you're set up to fail. That's important to remember when the project you're on fails miserably and the crap rolls downhill, of course assuming you weren't the screw-up.
Ahh, so they had to bury/destroy the game because it was imparting a life lesson that was dangerous to expose the hoi polloi to.
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not that there's much use for them now, to be sure - but as a kid, this was one of those games I spent hours and hours and hours on trying to beat... I had always thought it was me not being able to figure it out (I had no way of knowing otherwise, really) and only now am I aware, because of articles like these, that it was practically unbeatable due to its shoddy planning.
I bought the game new (on sale, natch) at Kay-Bee toys as a child, and beat it in about three days. I was not then nor am I now an amazingly apt gamer.
You didn't read the instructions. Shame on you.
I knew how to beat Raiders and after literally hundreds of tries I never managed to parachute into the hole beneath the tree branch. I'd say E.T. was easier than Raiders.
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Raiders (which I did beat) was easily the most complex game ever made for the 2600. I can't image how bad the people who couldn't beat E.T. would think Raiders was.
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Raiders (which I did beat) was easily the most complex game ever made for the 2600.
Well, if memory serves me, Star Raiders was a bit more complex. But IMO, it was easier. At least, to feel like I'd accomplished something. Another game I got on sale. Probably shoulda kept all that crap.
Re:Why, God, why? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, first they tried to get the cartridges to levitate themselves out, but they kept falling back to the bottom of the landfill.
Re:Why, God, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
E.T. wasn't as bad a game as it is now made out to be. It was bad, ok, but not that show piece of "worst game of all times" it's made out to be now. It just had a lot pushing against it.
1) Hype. The game was hyped like ... I have no idea if there has ever been anything hyped like that in contemporary history so younger... wait! SPORE! Yes, that about does it. No, not even close. Spore was hyped as the next best thing in computer gaming, the game to end all other games and whatnot... E.T. was worse. Way worse. It was like THE GAME for the 2600 would be coming, the ultimate pinnacle of computer gaming. If you won't have it, you'd be a NOTHING, your friends would not talk to you anymore, your dog would pack and leave ... you get the idea. The only thing they possibly didn't promise that this game would do is cure cancer. Nothing can possibly live up to such a standard, not today and by no means a game in that time and age back then.
2) Game-after-movie. Now, today games modeled after movies are usually rather well done. Most of the time, ok. Franchise holders don't want to tarnish their name with a bad game, knowing that their main audience for the movies is usually the same that buys the game, and the experience a movie goer has with the game that follows it may well be a deciding factor in the success of your sequel. Not so back then. Even until way into the 90s, games after movies were a surefire way to simply KNOW that they would suck donkey balls. There simply were never any good games modeled after movies. They were usually quick cash grabs that relies only on the movie title to sell. Also, considering that game budgets were tiny compared to today, the setback for the name already meant that for the game itself you only had a few pennies left. Usually games-after-movies were some kind of generic nondescript ripoff of an old idea with the movie hero somehow pasted into it. Often just by name only ("and this here is Rambo. He is. No, really. He has a bandana, see? Yeah, that white pixel that follows his head... somewhat...")
3) Rushed production. That game was rushed. Badly. The movie was out, the negotiations for the rights dragged on and the game needed to hit the shelves NOW or the hype about E.T. might lose steam before it's in. Nobody cares about a game for a movie of a year ago. And back then, movie and game were not being developed alongside each other, the game didn't even get designed until after the movie was halfway successful.
4) The big console crunch. While E.T. is usually one of the things blamed for the collapse of the video game market in 83, I dare say that it was less the game and more Atari buying its own hype. It seems they honestly believed that not only would everyone who owns a 2600 buy E.T., they even went as far as assuming that they'd sell 2600 units like hotcakes and that everyone would want at least one E.T. unit.
5) Complexity. When you play the game, you almost instantly get the impression that you're dealing with a very complex, very elaborate and very "rich" game. Soon after you notice that it has the depth of a wading pool, hiding behind an unnecessarily cryptic interface. After a while you simply can't shake the feeling that this game was supposed to be a LOT more but corners had to be cut. to the point where that square the game should be became a circle, so to speak. The gameplay hints at a lot more depth than there actually is, that the game's designer had a lot more planned for you, but time constraints and of course the limited ability of the console didn't let him deliver that promise.
In the end, what you have is a "could have been" title. It shows a lot of promise, actually, it also promises a lot, but it simply cannot keep that promise in the end. If anything, E.T. is a load of broken promises.
Of course, this leads to some heavy disappointment. When you expect a so-so game, E.T. would probably have delivered. When compared to other 2600 games, it's not really that bad a dud. It's a dud, no doubt
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It's a bit of a difference between a large, multinational corporation buying into some hype (especially if it's home made) and a bunch of nerds cooking up a hype storm about their pet project.
Which also seems to be yours. I can't really identify the connection to 3D printing, so why do you bring it up unless you care a lot about it?
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The connection is that they're both hyped up to 11.
Though you're right about one being a form decentralised hype. Should have a name, how about crowdshilling?
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Put 'em back in the landfill where they belong. Or better yet in an incincerator.
What? You didn't recognize the guy digging in the hole? (Hint: He's a very famous movie director!)
Sheesh, when was the last time you went to the movies? I thought it was rather obvious the depths at which Hollywood is reaching these days for script fodder.
(especially for sequels we're all dying for.)
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Unsold Lisas were rebadged and packaged with a Mac emulator as the 'Macintosh XL' and 'Macintosh Professional'.
So no need to bury them.
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I still see the need.
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Unsold Lisas were rebadged and packaged with a Mac emulator as the 'Macintosh XL' and 'Macintosh Professional'.
I, too, played "You Don't Know Mac" in the mid 90's on a PowerTower Pro 225.
Re: Why, God, why? (Score:4, Informative)
It worked out to be: plating thickness is 4e-5 inches, area on each contact is
$110k/1 million carts, but really, I would be amazed if labor, machinery costs, delivery, and refining costs would make that profitable.
You can find this game online cheap (Score:2)
WTF are they digging this up for?
Re:You can find this game online cheap (Score:5, Informative)
To determine the truth value of a proposition, namely whether or not Atari buried a shitload of bad video games under the literal earth. Not so that those games could then be played.
Re:You can find this game online cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing something but why is this such a big deal. Landfill is an obvious place to dump a bunch of stuff you don't want. Or did Atari not use an existing landfill but sent people out to dig a hole specially for these cartridges?
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Oh sure. NASA fakes a moon landing, but you think Microsoft can't fake a film about a landfill in the desert?
Re:You can find this game online cheap (Score:5, Funny)
WTF are they digging this up for?
To make room for the surface tablets.
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To make room for the surface tablets.
Sure it's not to make room for unsold Blackberry 10s and Zunes?
At least the surface pro tablets were perfectly functional solitaire players
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Broken chairs.
Re:You can find this game online cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
It wouldn't work. Microsoft products can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Why on middle earth would you want to pollute the lavas of Mount Doom with Zune players?
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It's there. That's always been enough reason for me.
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Bottom of the ocean is too dark and wet, the center of the earth to hot and the surface of the sun too far away. AND too hot.
I don't like dark, wet or hot places. Mars is pretty cool, though... well, ok, not during the day, but any nerd worth his pocket protector hibernates beneath the crust of the planet during the day anyway so that pesky bright light on top of the big room can't hit him.
As nature intended. (Score:5, Funny)
Considering you spent most of the game stuck in a pit, they were just returned to their natural habitat.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means (Score:5, Insightful)
By contrast, the burial of ET in the desert meets none of those criteria. Atari dumped millions of cartridges in the New Mexico desert to dispose of them, we have an abundance of documentation from the era that it really happened, and the only "moral" to the story involves not expecting your developers to cover your $12M bet with their own asses in the month before Christmas.
Otherwise - Very cool, to see these recovered. Now they can properly recycle them as eWaste, rather than just letting them slowly leach lead into the ground.
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In its time the ET Landfill was an urban legend simply because the Internet wasn't commonplace. The "abundance of documentation" was hard to come by for a kid in rural Washington in the late 80s. Because of this, I had to stick to my sources that were available to me, that being the cousin of a friend of a best friend's older cousin who lived in the southwest somewhere a few years ago.
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I don't know about recycling--if there really are that many cartridges, you could make some chic video game partitions or something out of them, assuming the only thing physically wrong with them is having some dirt/dust.
Re:That word doesn't mean what you think it means (Score:5, Informative)
Atari denied it.
When prompted key Atari figures would not comment and the lead programmer said there is no way we would have done that.
Locals say otherwise.
I was interested and there maybe more gems there (like ET was a gem) like the experimental controller that never hit the market, documents, and other materials. Centipede was found there too. It looks like they just cleared a whole warehouse and dumped it.
So yes this qualifies as an urban legend.
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The NY Times and other contemporary articles writing about it, and the fact that the games are documented being made and were never sold. They had to go somewhere.
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"An abundance of documentation", despite the fact that the guy who created the game, who knew everyone who worked at Atari at the time, had no knowledge of it happening. What documentation do you have that's more credible than that? Made up documentation, perhaps?
I've always taken the burial as fact, (by whatever article I read of it at the time). The author was told by one who had been in the party that buried them. Difference being it was said they were taken out and disposed of "where nobody could ever find them again", never mentioned it being a garbage dump.
I looked at Snopes yet the page doesn't show for me, http://www.snopes.com/business... [snopes.com] so I don't know what others thought of it.
Person who created the game pry wasn't the most popular person around Atari a
So where are the burial grounds for... (Score:5, Funny)
...Windows ME [wikipedia.org] and Vista [wikipedia.org]? :-)
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Probably next to the hole they dug for Microsoft 'Bob' [wikipedia.org]
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Burial wasn't sufficient for Windows ME; it had to be nuked from orbit [nukeitfromorbit.com].
1982 Ad (Score:2)
E.T. Needs Your Help! [staticflickr.com]
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Back then I wasn't half the programmer I am today, I guess I come too late.
Documentary deleted scenes (Score:5, Funny)
What you won't see in their documentary is the part where after digging the big hole, they accidentally fall in, and can't get the heck out!
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where after digging the big hole, they accidentally fall in, and can't get the heck out!
That part had to be censored due to copyright/licensing issues
eBay here we come... (Score:3)
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Except it's not rare at all. You can buy 50 of them at any given time on ebay if you wanted to, which nobody does.
Err...actually...
I'm that nobody, I bought one from eBay.
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The most numerous cartridge in history being not rare? You don't say... next you wanna tell me the coin set I bought on the TV shop that's guaranteed to have a chance to increase in value isn't a limited edition either...
AVGN (Score:2)
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Considering that the AVGN just did a movie based on this legend, I wonder what his reaction will be?
No need to wonder: http://cinemassacre.com/2014/0... [cinemassacre.com]
The movie is still in post, by the way. It isn't done yet.
E.T Hype Fest (Score:5, Insightful)
As a kid in early 80's, I remember the unprecedented media onslaught around E.T., which was a harbinger for things to come.
They had cross over promotions for everything from Reese's Pieces, McDonald's Happy Meals, Breakfast Cereals, Lunch Boxes and Underoos.
While watching Scooby-Doo and other afternoon cartoons, then it seemed nearly every other ad on TV was either a tailer for ET or ET related.
And then... the big day came, the Movie came out and with bated breath I waited in one of the longest lines ever at the theatre for what was surely the greatest movie ever made. Only to find myself half asleep in a dark movie theatre waiting desperately for the most boring piece of sappy ass garbage to end so I could go home.
And that day in 1982, a 10 year old boy became jaded and cynical.
It was truly a "Drink your Ovaltine" moment.
Re:E.T Hype Fest (Score:5, Insightful)
...waiting desperately for the most boring piece of sappy ass garbage to end so I could go home.
And that day in 1982, a 10 year old boy became jaded and cynical.
It was truly a "Drink your Ovaltine" moment.
And then you had to watch Star Wars Episode 1 with Jar Jar and racing graphical effects in an unrealistic plot.
Re:E.T Hype Fest (Score:4, Insightful)
Star Wars Ep1 had a plot? Throughout the movie I was waiting for the pod racer game [wikipedia.org] ad to end and the movie to start.
Re:E.T Hype Fest (Score:4, Informative)
And then after Spielberg replaced all the guns in the movie with walkie-talkies, it ruined that one good scene where Elliott shot his eye out.
The hype around the movie was pretty bad, but I don't remember this as the most overhyped Atari 2600 game. I'd give that honor to the 2600 Pac-Man. The first commercial [youtube.com] in heavy rotation for that one didn't even show the real gameplay. They kinda ripped off the music to "Pac-Man Fever" there too.
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She was also the girl Elliot kissed during the drunk/frog scene in ET.
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Yes it was ( is ) over hyped, but it really wasn't THAT bad..
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Indeed, "Night Skies" was the original name, wasn't it?
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No, really. It was pretty lame with some very ham-fisted emotional manipulation.
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Amazing what you can interpret people as saying if you ignore words that they use. Idiot.
I went there in 2006 (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife and I were driving across the USA in late 2006 (the last day of 2006 even). I accidentally/intentionally routed us about 400 miles out of our way to pay a visit to the landfill. I had found the address on the net. We got there and I couldn't quite find it, then realized all the suburban build up was probably blocking it. Sure enough, behind the Sonic was the remains of the landfill. My (patient) wife stayed at the Sonic while I spent a couple hours wandering around the landfill site. She didn't have the same level of excitement about it that I did.
I found bits of trash, but no Atari cartridges. I took a lot of photos and video that I need to get online. (now 7 years later). I have one there though:
http://www.humanclock.com/news... [humanclock.com]
After we got back home to Portland I put up a blurb about it on my website. The very next day I received an email from a guy in Brazil who excitedly wrote: "WOW! YOU ACTUALLY WENT THERE!" I showed the email to my wife and said: "Look honey, I am not alone!"
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Do others exist? (Score:2)
Being serious here, are there legit copies that exist out in the real world or is this it? If there are others, leave these in the ground. They will be rotted beyond belief at this point. There is really nothing to be gained in that case.
I'm all for digging up the 'only copy in existence' to stick in a museum, but i dont think that is what is going on here.
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Yes, some idiots (one being me) actually bought the game and have the cartridges. They're by far not rare, you can get them fairly cheaply on e-bay (compared to a few REALLY rare ancient games they're practically thrown at you 'til you surrender).
There's more than that in landfills (Score:5, Funny)
My mom threw away my old Atari 2600 console in the late 1980's along with a dozen cartridges. If anyone wants to mount an expedition to recover it, I can tell you approximately where it's buried. Oh, and there were some umm... magazines with it that I used to keep under my bed, you can keep the 2600, but I'd like to have the magazines back for educational purposes --I haven't finished reading the articles.
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You realize that the ... "articles" have more wrinkles now in reality than they could possibly have in the magazines, yes?
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trapped (Score:4, Informative)
THAT
My parents never bought me a game console, but a few of my friends had them, and I had two friends with 2600's that had that cart. I recall trying to play it, and yes, immense frustration. You'd walk around on a 2d map with a grid of rooms, and random rooms would be trapped. I could spend 10 minutes trying to levitate out of a trap. My friends usually had better luck, because they'd been playing it so much more, but even they would average several attempts to get out of a single trap. I can see why peope would return the game. Ten minutes of that and the cart came out and something else went in.
iirc, the trick was to let go of the levitate button AND hit the only correct exit direction, at precisely the moment you emerged from the hole. Otherwise, you'd fall right back in. (I never did really get the timing down, I only got out on rare occasion, I think due to luck) After a few attempts, you'd be out of energy. I think elliot would magically stop by with a handful of reeces pieces or whatever, at a cost of your score, but all that did was extend the frustration. It was impossible to beat the game without both a good memory and escaping several traps. If you had difficulty with the (random) map, you could easily have to deal with dozens of trapped rooms.
Imagine climging up a ladder and just as you peek your head over the roof edge someone is swinging a shovel at you. You have a split second to dodge the shovel and pull them off the roof or you're falling. Now repeat that 15-20 times. That was 90% of the game.
You don't have to dig up E.T. (Score:2)
He's self-resurecting.
Emulation to the rescue (Score:5, Interesting)
This story reminds me of this guy who has fixed the game by ROM hacking: http://www.neocomputer.org/pro... [neocomputer.org]
Quite an interesting read if you're familiar with (or wondered about) Atari or assembly programming.
C'mon Slashdot! (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, maybe they can learn a thing or two...
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How about "Microsoft sponsors research into historic abysmal software releases to try and explain Windows 8"
They belong in a museum! (Score:2)
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in turn exhibited in a landfill museum
There's nothing 'infamous' about this story (Score:2)
E.T. in 1983 (Score:2)
Back in 1983, your games didn't "Phone Home".
Angry Video Game Nerd (Score:2)
He's gonna take you back to the past
To play the shitty games that suck ass
He'd rather have a buffallo
Take a diarrhea dump in his ear
He'd rather eat the rotten asshole
Of a road killed skunk and down it with beer
He's the angriest gamer you've ever heard
He's the Angry Nintendo Nerd
He's the Angry Atari Sega Nerd
He's the Angry Video Game Nerd
When you turn on the TV
Make sure it's tuned to channel three
He's got a nerdy shirt and a pocket pouch
Although I've never seen him write anything down
He's got a powerglove an
Notice the landfill? (Score:2)
30 years later and nothing has really happened inside that landfill, just a pile of toxic shit in a gigantic hole. One of tens of thousands.
THAT is the real tragedy here. We just throw shit in holes and move on.
A real ET? (Score:2)
Am I the only one who read that headline and whose first thought was that they were talking about the remains of a real extraterrestrial from the supposed flying saucer crash in New Mexico in the 1950's? Maybe I should turn in my geek card. (BTW, I knew about the ET game cartridges in the land fill but I hadn't paid that much attention to the story so it didn't register that way at first.)
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The Sept 28,1983 NYT article... (Score:2)
"The company has dumped 14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and other computer equipment at the city landfill in Alamogordo, N.M. Guards kept reporters and spectators away from the area yester
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I think when they said the game stank, they didn't literally mean it was giving off methane.
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Yes, there were many, especially the non-arcade ports from Atari and most of the games made by Activision. There were even a few good third party games but those were few and far between. While most of those games were great for the time, many are still pretty good games today. Games like "H.E.R.O.", Demon Attack, Kaboom, Haunted House, Yar's Revenge, and Megamania still hold up well as fun today.
The problem with the Atari is very similar to what happened with the Wii, plenty of good games that got so total