There are bad video games, and then there’s the game that was allegedly so bad it was buried in the desert. And then, in a plot twist no one ordered, somebody dug it up.
A rush job for the ages
In 1982, Atari wanted a video game tie-in for Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in time for the holidays, which meant the game had to be made in a matter of weeks. Reports say designer Howard Scott Warshawsky had roughly five weeks to build it. That’s about how long some of us take to choose a couch.
The reaction
The game was widely panned. Players found it confusing, with a big emphasis on falling into pits, and it’s often cited as one of the worst games ever made and a symbol of the 1983 video game crash. Retailers were reportedly left with unsold copies, and the whole thing became a punchline.
The landfill legend
The story goes that Atari secretly buried a massive number of unsold cartridges and other hardware in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1983. For decades, it sounded like an urban legend, the kind of tale people tell about a company that wants a problem to go away.
Then, in 2014, a team excavated the site. They found Atari cartridges, including E.T., confirming that the burial was real. It was, as far as video game archaeology goes, a rare moment where the legend and the truth shook hands.
The twist
The excavation also suggested the story is a bit more nuanced than “this one game destroyed an industry.” The crash had many causes, including a flood of low-quality games and a market that got too crowded. E.T. just happened to be the most memorable face on the poster. So the next time someone tells you a game is the worst ever, tell them there’s a hole in New Mexico that proves it’s complicated.