Buried E.T. Cartridges Found in Infamous Landfill

Here's a thing about stuff that's terrible: Just because there's something slightly more terrible (and having played both, I disagree that Pac-Man is worse than ET) doesn't make it not bad. Or even less bad.

That's a maxim I wish more people online would adopt.

It is nice to see confirmation of the legend. I once did an oral report for a business class in college on Nintendo, and I mentioned the legend in describing the environment Nintendo was entering. I had mentioned it as fact during the report, then later heard it described as being "just a legend". I am now vindicated!

As for the game itself, I've never played it. I was in my mother's womb when the game first came out.

For some reason, my first thoughts upon hearing this were,

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I was buried here.

edited 28th Apr '14 8:03:09 PM by MaxwellDaring

Huh. I'll admit that I'd started thinking that it was just a publicity thing by the mayor of the town, kind of like how Roswell plays up the UFO angle while sniggering up their sleeve at all of the tourists coming to look at the site.

The evidence so far does seem to indicate that it was not the "millions" of cartridges that was originally posited, but a few hundred found so far.

Well, it is pretty realistic for rumors to be overly exaggerated versions of real events

Welp, ya jinxed us ow.

I played both Pac-Man and ET on those old Atari cartridges. Count me as one of the people who sort of liked them, although I imagine that was because I was too young to have developed much in the way of standards. I spent so much time playing ET... it never occurred to me that the game was hard because it was a rush job with tons of bugs.

edited 29th Apr '14 6:37:53 AM by Fighteer

It seems like a reasonable assumption. This is the kind of story that tends to end with guys' faces melting off.

According to the Bullseye in Entertainment Weekly Issue # 1310 (May 9, 2014):

Also, here's another story from Eurogamer: Grave business: ET, Atari, and the reason some games need to be buried

This was never actually an urban legend. Some of the exact details were exaggerated (some people were saying it was only ET cartridges or that they dumped millions of them, or that it was Atari's entire stock of games) but it's been known since the time that it actually happened.