Context

In 1982, Atari took its incredibly popular game Pac-Man and ported it to its newest console, the Atari 2600. The company produced 12 million copies of the game in anticipation of record sales of both the console and the game itself. When the game finally released, Atari only sold 7 million copies of the game. Critics and consumers alike also panned the game, describing it as an "imposter" of the original arcade game that had been so popular. It was later revealed that Atari had rushed development of the port and therefore the subsequent product was disappointing and lackluster to consumers. Despite the response from critics and consumers, Atari considered the release a success, having still sold a large amount of copies of the game. This overconfidence for Atari was an omen for what was to come for the company later that year, and would mark the beginning of the downfall of videogame companies in the 1980s.

The movie E.T. the Extraterrestrial from director Steven Spielberg had just released in June of 1982, and was a certifiable hit. Atari took notice and reportedly paid $21 million for the rights to publish an E.T. video game. Howard Scott Warshaw, a programmer at Atari, had recently created the video game adaptation of Spielberg's previous hit Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so Atari and Spielberg asked Warshaw to create an adaptation for E.T. There was a major catch: Warshaw had to complete programming of the game in five weeks in order to meet production deadlines and have the game available for winter. This was unprecedented; video game development at the time took months, not weeks. Nonetheless, Warshaw got to work and delivered the finished product by the deadline. Atari created a massive marketing campaign for the game and produced an initial 4 million units in preperation for massive sales during the holiday season. In December 1982, the game released.

Initially, the game seemed like a success; it was "right up there on the Billboard top sellers". However, consumers began to complain about various design failures throughout the game. The pits were incredibly easy to fall into, and it was often difficult to exit the pits; once E.T. had exited a pit, the user had to quickly move the joystick in a certain direction in order to prevent the character from falling down the pit again. The game sold over a million copies, but sales declined rapidly once consumers realized the quality of the game was sub-par. Many consumers returned their copies to the retailers they bought them from. Quickly, Atari realized that the game was a massive failure.

The lack of sales of the game meant that millions of copies of the game were sitting in warehouses, and were practically useless for Atari. In 1983, in an unprecedented move, Atari took hundreds of thousands of copies of the game and buried them in a landfill in Alamagordo, New Mexico. This action became legend in the video game world, and was often perceived to be an urban myth, until 2014.

In April of 2014, a documentary film crew producing a film about the failure of the E.T. video game got permission from the town of Alamagordo to dig up the landfill where the cartridges were supposedly buried. The excavacation yielded results; hundreds of copies of the game were located beneath the dirt and cement of the landfill and were recovered, albeit many in horrible condition. The urban myth was no longer a myth, and the game's legacy became more crucial to video game history.