Raiders of the Lost Atari Game

As an eight-year-old who received a brand-new Atari video game system as a Christmas present in 1982, I remember being thrilled to find the E.T. The Extra Terrestrial game amongst the collection of new games also delivered to our house by Santa that year.  After all, it was the biggest movie of the year (or ever, at the time), which I'd seen three times over the summer.  How cool was it to have a video game version?

It's not like it wasn't heavily hyped as the perfect Christmas present that year.

That commercial would have been perfect if E.T. wound up having to blow on the cartridge before putting it in the Atari console. (That's an 80s thing, kids.  Ask your parents.)

Anyway, the E.T. game turned out to not be a very good game.  Actually, it was historically bad.  It was so terrible that my aunt, who gave us the game for Christmas that year, has yet to be forgiven by mother for bringing that game into our house in the first place.  Even today, at the mere mention of the E.T. game, she'll break into the neverending tap-tap-tap-tap footstep noise that E.T. made as he marched endlessly from blocky, badly-animdated-screen-to-blocky, badly-animated-screen looking for the pieces of his lost communicator that would send his spaceship to take him home.  Sometimes E.T. would fall down a well and just get stuck there.  Other times, the E.T. theme music would get stuck on a single note that would just go on and on...which is why my mom made my sister and me play it with the sound off.

But E.T. wasn't just a crappy game that left us kids bored, and drove our mom up a wall.  It was such a catastrophic bomb that it's been held to blame for the fall of the Atari game system, as the company was essentially bankrupted after being left with millions of unsold copies. 

Those unsold game cartridges have long-believed to have been given the same treatment worthy of a snitch on The Sopranos, after the New York Times reported that the cartridges were dumped in a New Mexico landfill and buried in concrete in 1983, although Atari has long-denied the story.

However, it looks like the mystery of the lost games may be solved.  According to ABC News, a Canadian film company called Fuel Industries has gotten permission to dig up that fabled landfill and see what may or may not be down there in hopes of making a documentary.

Why?  We have no idea.  The game cartridges were likely crushed before they were dumped, so even if they do strike 2600-level gold, none of them will be playable.  I can attest that the E.T. game was unplayable even before it was crushed and smothered in concrete.  But it's also long been rumored that other Atari goodies may have buried along with the E.T. cartridges, so it will be interesting to see what they do end up finding...even if hopes of finding a working 80s-era underground arcade are slim (but would be awesome).

At the very least, Snopes will be able to confirm if the 'buried Atari games' legend is true or not.