After 31 years of being buried in a dump in New Mexico, one of the biggest mysteries in video games has finally been solved. Today, crews at an Alamogordo landfill discovered buried cartridges of the infamous, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, originally released by Atari in December of 1982.
Although it did sell 1.5 million copies, E.T. (the video game) was generally received negatively by critics, leaving millions of cartridges unsold. In September of 1983, the Alamogordo Daily News ran a series of articles that claimed between 10 and 20 semi-trailer trucks dumped various Atari hardware and games in a nearby landfill. With inconsistent reports of what was actually buried, speculation has run rampant for many years… until today.
As part of an upcoming documentary, the Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, crews were given access to the suspected landfill. Only a short time into the excavation, an unknown number of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial cartridges were discovered in near perfect condition.
Even though the game might have been a flop, this kind of makes us want to dust off the old Atari for a few hours.
Check out a photo, shared by Larry Hryb (known by many as Major Nelson) via Twitter several hours ago.
Source: Wikipedia and Major Nelson.
