For the young guys amongst us who don't know the urban legend about the Atari ET game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)
Just finished reading the great book "Atari business is fun" and there the story is at least corrected a bit, but more important, the failure of the game was all to blame to some stupid business suit who agreed to pay an insane amount of money for the license and then "phoned home" to tell them to make the game in six weeks......
It also was NOT the "biggest commercial failure in the history of video gaming", in fact they sold millions of he game (OK, on the name only probably, and wether people actually like it or not is doubtful) but there were and are many much larger failures in the history of video gaming.
I still think the game sucks, but you can't blame the programmer, after all he also created the best Atari 2600 game......Yar's Revenge.
I was looking at this and found this article, they are digging it up!!
A documentary crew has received approval to dig up the New Mexico desert site where Atari supposedly buried millions of unsold pieces of Atari 2600 software and hardware. The crew hopes to finally confirm or refute one of gaming's most enduring urban legends.
The city council in Alamogordo, New Mexico granted approval for the project this week. Ottawa-based multimedia and marketing firm Fuel Industries will excavate the site some time in the next six months for a documentary it's filming, local news site KRQE reports. This year marks what will be the 30 year anniversary of the assumed September 1983 burial, which came during the height of the great video game crash. That sudden market reversal supposedly left Atari with millions of unsold and unsalable cartridges and systems, which were dumped in an Alamogordo landfill and later covered in concrete.
While at least one Atari employee has cast doubts on the plausibility of the story, the burial was reported in contemporaneous reports in the Alamogordo Daily News and The New York Times. The former paper got confirmation from the garbage disposal company that was used, and the latter got confirmation from an Atari spokesperson. So it's pretty unlikely the production company is walking into an Al Capone's vault-type situation.
Still, there are questions that remain unanswered. While the 3.5 million unsold copies of E.T. are most commonly cited as the likely bulk of the burial, reports suggest the dump may also contain unsold consoles, PCs, and even prototypes of the Atari Mindlink controller. There's significant disagreement as to how much material was dumped in the landfill, with reports ranging from nine to 20 full dump trucks.
Personally, we're hoping Fuel Industries decides to chip away portions of the massive dumping and sell them off to collectors, Berlin Wall-style. After all, who wouldn't love to own a piece of gaming history that can also serve as a paperweight?
Source:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/film-crew-to-dig-up-atari-landfill-site-maybe-score-3-5-million-copies-of-e-t/Just another thing I found (I don't know if it has been posted before):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rt_3_bQVJU skip to about 1:50
