E.T. Found In New Mexico Landfill

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?

[n1ywb]

Put 'em back in the landfill where they belong. Or better yet in an incincerator.

As nature intended.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering you spent most of the game stuck in a pit, they were just returned to their natural habitat.

Re:You can find this game online cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are they digging this up for?

To make room for the surface tablets.

So where are the burial grounds for...

[theodp]

...Windows ME [wikipedia.org] and Vista [wikipedia.org]? :-)

Re:So where are the burial grounds for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably next to the hole they dug for Microsoft 'Bob' [wikipedia.org]

Documentary deleted scenes

[linebackn]

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!

Re:ET's not that bad.

[The Snowman]

It's really not. I had it as a kid and enjoyed it. It could have used another 3 months polish (there's a rom hack floating around that does just that) and you _really_ have to read the instructions to play, but as a kid used to nothing more complex than Space Invaders I loved it. There were multiple screens (a big deal back then) and several different gameplay elements (also a big deal). I suppose it doesn't hurt that I bought it on clearance post crash, but I was so young it didn't occur to me that $5 bucks wasn't much money for a game.

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.

There's more than that in landfills

[hawguy]

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.

Re:ET's not that bad.

[TheRealMindChild]

and you _really_ have to read the instructions to play No kidding! Once upon a time, having a $50 Atari 2600, the only game I had was asteroids. At a yard sale, I picked up E.T. for $1, though it had no instruction manual. I played that for way way way too many hours, thinking I needed some secret hidden one last piece to the phone. Of course I never found it, the atari broke and I sold that E.T. cartridge at a yard sale for $1. Fast forward 25 years I pick up a 2600 in a nice clean original box, along with E.T. and several other games with nice clean boxes and instruction booklets. I took it all home and I broke open the E.T. instructions. All that time I wasted... there was no one more piece to the phone, I always got them all! You just had to go back to the very spot E.T. landed at the beginning of the game and press the button. I beat the game in 5 minutes.

C'mon Slashdot!

[jdavidb]

This should've been billed as: "Worst video game ever made, recovered with Microsoft sponsorship."