Atari 2600 licensed games · Atari 2600 · 1982 · Preceded by: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982)
Given five and a half weeks to build a game that normally took six to nine months, Howard Scott Warshaw produced the title that became the symbol of the 1983 crash — and ended up buried in a New Mexico landfill.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is the most infamous video game ever made, and the circumstances of its creation explain almost everything about why. Atari's negotiations for the rights to Steven Spielberg's blockbuster concluded in late July 1982, and the company wanted the game on shelves for the Christmas season. That left designer Howard Scott Warshaw just over five weeks — five and a half, against the six to nine months a 2600 game would normally take — to conceive, build, and ship it. Warshaw was not a hack. He had produced Yars' Revenge, one of the most inventive and best-loved games on the platform, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, an ambitious adventure that had shown real design ambition. Given a normal schedule he might well have made something good. Given five weeks, he produced a game whose obscure objectives and notorious pits — into which E.T. falls constantly and escapes only through a fiddly levitation mechanic — baffled and infuriated the children who unwrapped it at Christmas. The game was savaged and has been cited ever since as one of the worst ever made and one of the biggest commercial failures in the industry's history. Atari had manufactured cartridges in enormous quantities on the assumption that a Spielberg licence could not fail, and it was left with a vast unsold surplus. In September 1983 the company took the excess stock from a warehouse in El Paso, Texas, and buried it in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, to stop anyone scavenging it. For thirty years the burial was dismissed as an urban legend. Then, on 26 April 2014, an excavation open to the public dug up the site and found the cartridges exactly as the story had claimed. One of the recovered copies now resides in the Smithsonian's collection — an object that has come to personify the video game crash of 1982–85 itself. E.T. did not cause the crash single-handedly, but it remains its perfect artefact: a rushed, cynical licensed cash-in that consumers rejected, buried in the desert and later exhumed as history.
The single fact that explains E.T. is its schedule. Atari concluded the licensing deal in late July 1982 and needed cartridges in stores for Christmas, leaving Howard Scott Warshaw just over five weeks to make a game that would normally have taken six to nine months. Warshaw was among Atari's most capable designers — Yars' Revenge remains one of the 2600's finest games — but no designer could have delivered a polished, comprehensible product in that window. The result was a game with opaque goals and the infamous pits that swallow E.T. again and again, and children who tore off the wrapping paper on Christmas morning found something they could neither understand nor enjoy.
Atari had manufactured cartridges on the assumption that a Spielberg licence was a guaranteed hit, and was left with a mountain of unsold stock. In September 1983 it cleared the surplus from an El Paso warehouse and buried it in a landfill at Alamogordo, New Mexico, specifically to prevent scavenging. The story hardened into urban legend until a public excavation on 26 April 2014 dug up the site and found the cartridges exactly where the legend said they were. One recovered copy now sits in the Smithsonian, and the image of a landfill full of E.T. cartridges has become the enduring visual shorthand for the entire 1982–85 video game crash.