Remember the story of E.T. for the Atari 2600? This game was so bad, it was buried in a landfill. It’s been a long running urban legend that all of the unsold copies of the game were buried underground and that the company never spoke of it again. However, Microsoft recently set out to prove that this was more than just an urban legend.
Xbox Entertainment Studios organized a dig of a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico to see if E.T. was really buried there, and sure enough they hit paydirt… bad licensed movie game paydirt. Tons of copies of the awful game were found, alongside other much more successful games like Centipede . Microsoft will be turning the dig into a documentary that will premiere exclusively on Xbox platforms later this year.
“The findings started out very promising, with an old, dusty Atari 2600 joystick buried in the landfill,” Xbox Wire Staff said. “Then an ‘ E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ’ cartridge. A box. An instruction manual. And the confirmation of ‘a lot more down there.’”
The working title for the documentary will be called Atari: Game Over .
Source: Xbox Wire