ET Video Game

A few years ago, I saw this music video, which tells the story of ET for the Atari 2600. I had played the game as a kid, and remember being bored and frustrated, but didn't remember thinking it was the worst game ever played (probably because I had such low standards and would probably keep playing a bad game, if for no other reason than that I tend to have problems with self-control). But I had never heard that it was perhaps partly responsible for a major industry-wide downturn (it and a Pacman videogame that did poorly). Nor did I hear that Atari actually buried 2.5 million of them in a New Mexico landfill. The NYT first wrote about it back in 1983, but it doesn't mention that the dumping was ET - just that Atari was dumping a lot of games in there. The city was apparently upset, and ordered Atari to stop (or ordered the landfill to stop accepting Atari's shipments), because they worried partly of kids digging in this landfill for the game (not at all an impossible thing to imagine).

I get the sense from the wikipedia article that it's not entirely proven to be true; that it may be part urban legend, and since the games were crushed and then covered with cement, I doubt you can find the answer at the landfill (thus, that last part of the video ain't accurate). But, it's nonetheless an amazing story. The guy who wrote the game was given six weeks, apparently, to put the game together for the movie tie-in, and Atari ended up making 4 million of the games. It is widely agreed to be a horrible game, but in this list, it is only listed as the tenth worst game. Even The Matrix Reloaded tie-in was ranked as worse.