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The home video game market boomed in 1983 with revenues of $3.2 billion, but by 1985, it had dropped to $100 million. Atari’s game based on ET the Extra-Terrestrial was a costly failure, resulting in millions of unsold cartridges dumped in a New Mexico landfill. In 2014, a documentary crew excavated the landfill and found thousands of cartridges. Atari went bankrupt two years after paying $22 million to Steven Spielberg for the rights to the game. Nearly 900 copies were sold on eBay for over $108,000, and a single cartridge sold at auction for $1,535.
The home video game market soared in 1983, with revenues of approximately $3.2 billion a year. Then the fund fell, and by 1985, annual revenues were down to about $100 million dollars, a drop of nearly 97 percent. Around the same time, industry leader Atari took an expensive gamble and put together a game based on the popular 1982 film ET the Extra-Terrestrial in just 34 days. But the game exploded and the company was left with millions of unsold cartridges. Fittingly, Atari quietly dumped useless ET cartridges in a junkyard in southern New Mexico, not far from where aliens reportedly landed in 1947. That unceremonious end to history was just a rumor for 30 years and considered an urban legend – until an enterprising documentary crew got permission to excavate an Alamogordo landfill in 2014 and found thousands of game cartridges buried there.
Game Over:
Atari paid director Steven Spielberg $22 million for the rights to turn ET into a video game. Two years later, Atari went bankrupt and the video game market in its own right vanished.
Nearly 900 unearthed copies of what has been described as the worst video game of all time were later sold on eBay, earning over $108,000. An ET cartridge sold at auction for $1,535.
A documentary about the dig, titled Atari: Game Over, premiered in 2014. The diggers still have around 300 copies of the game that may be sold at a later date.
