E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill | Hacker News Reader

E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill

polygon.com

126 pointsDoubleguitars46 comments

This story reminds me of the B-17s used in the 1963 Steve McQueen movie "The War Lover".

3 B-17's were procured, put in flying condition, and flown to England. With some clever photography and editing, the movie makes those 3 airplanes look like a fleet. After the movie, what was to be done with the planes?

The British government wanted some large import tax on them, but the movie production budget was exhausted. They couldn't even afford to buy the gas to fly them back to the US. The movie company tried to GIVE the airplanes to a British museum, but the government still wanted their import tax, and the museums couldn't pay the tax, either.

The solution was to pour gasoline on them and burn them to the ground.

I love this story. thanks for sharing. It's a great conundrum dealing with the HMRC machine. I imagine it as a robot relying on syntax. If it doesn't get the right syntax it defaults to "You owe HMRC £xxxxxx. Please pay within 7 days." To tackle the machine I imagine creating an equal machine that will churn out replies, forever in a loop with the HMRC machine. Then I exit stage left and continue with my everyday happy life.

I saw a funny, but also sad, bit by a comedian once. I wish I could remember his name.

"Everything you've ever owned is still out there," he said. "Remember those rollerblades you used once in 1994? Those still exist. Except maybe in little pieces. Maybe in the ocean."

Maybe in 20 years someone will dig up a few of those millions of plastic Guitar Hero guitars that are now wasting away in landfills for a documentary.

That would be the great Bill Burr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vJty38k7n4

Thanks for pointing to the hilarious source!

This isn't always the case. In Norway, for example, landfills are rare and most non-recyclable trash is incinerated to provide heat. So if you put something in the garbage here, odds are it'll be turned into carbon dioxide by next week.

I look forward to the day humans are forced to mine landfills to get previous goods.

It will be amazing when the cheapest (maybe only?) way to get <raw material> is to recycle old discarded stuff.

I always thought we would have swarms of nanobots that chewed on the landfills for a decade or so and sorted the mess into tidy piles of pure elements.

What do you then do with the nanobots?

Turn half off and have the other half chew through them, recursively.

Yeah, I've been wondering if mineral rights in landfills would make sense as an investment. It's an interesting collection of stuff-humans-once-had-use-for, and as recycling tech improves...

For some elements maybe.

Iron, glass, paper and plastic will never run out though. And we already recycle lots of metals.

You would probably like this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification That's how you recycle bulk garbage, but it's expensive in terms of energy, so we have to solve that first.

You need not wait, the future is here today, in Brazil and elsewhere: http://www.wastelandmovie.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_picker

This guy is making a movie about that game: http://cinemassacre.com/2014/03/23/avgn-movie-timeline-updat...

I'm both amazed and disappointed that this urban legend turned out to be true. The former because who the would do that in the first place? The latter because who the would do that in the first place?

Well this happened back when we really didn't give a shit about the environment AND just before conspicuous consumption more or less defined the 80s.

What I'm dumbfounded by is why they didn't simply give them away? It reminds me of all the stupid YouTube videos of people who wait in line to buy the latest Apple product only to smash it in front of everyone else waiting in line...

It Is a shity game. Allowing people to play it would have been bad for the brand.

Where I work, we(someone) burns the stuff that we can't sell not cause the stuff is bad, it is done to make shore the brand does not get associated with Cheap stuff.

Brand status is important.

(I know it is somewhat insane but it is the way capitalism works)

And yet look where Atari is today..

Classical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

One of the local super markets sends containers full of new TVs, washing machines, and more, to the local scrap yard. They didn't sell them within the period that they expected, and instead of discounting them (which would drive away consumers from more expensive products), they 'recycle' them.

Atari games were discounted to $1 or $2 and they were stacked to the celling at major retailers. They sat around discount stores for a decade afterward. There's still warehouses full of them.[1] The company produced millions more games than the number of systems they sold, so who would they have given them too?

[1] http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/02/gamesetinterview_ataricl...

If I remember correctly, the cartridges had to be destroyed for tax reasons.

> this happened back when we really didn't give a shit about the environment

The first Earth Day was in 1970: http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-history-movement

Which is not to say it was impossible in the early '80s to not give a shit about the environment, just that by that point ignorance really wasn't a good excuse anymore.

> What I'm dumbfounded by is why they didn't simply give them away?

ET for Atari was that horrible. You cannot give it away.

Having "played"` the game when I was much younger, they were probably trying to save some face and pretend the mess never existed.

` It's not really playable because of horrible collision detection and no mentions of your objective, AFAIR.

Some guy fixed most of that stuff - http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

Yeah I've read that article before.

Of course it doesn't change the fact that what was shipped on the cartridges 30 years ago was crap, or the fact it took 30 years for someone to decide to fix it. Atari's decision remains the same, in my opinion.

So that they can properly claim a financial loss? Wasn't the same thing done for the Apple Lisa and GM EV1?

I'm not amazed, but I was at Atari when these were being landfilled.

Atari was falling apart amazingly fast, and losing about a million dollars a day toward the end (whereupon, massive layoffs, and some of us got to work for Jack Tramiel, while others got to stay in Atari Coin-op).

Also, there were about 14 million Atari 2600 consoles in existence, and this number includes the ones in closets.

Atari manufactured many millions more than that, apparently on the theory that the game would drive 2600 sales as well.

I'll tell you, Atari marketing was terrible. They had no earthly clue what they were doing. Oh, I've got stories...

Tell us some. Please.

There's some great behind the scene stories on the ANTIC Atari 8-bit podcast. The best one I heard was "these guys didn't even play the games."

The Benefit of Doubt: Nobody knew how to market video games yet. Their failures taught Nintendo and Sega how to.

Seriously though: I KNOW RIGHT?! You can't sell more items than your market has consumers. That is unless you're expecting them to break your item out of frustration and then replace it.

Well, there's "benefit of doubt," and then there's "anybody who played this game for more than five minutes would realize that it's unshippable garbage".

Except that marketing guys wanted their bonuses, and didn't know shit about games, and furthermore they didn't care (because Atari's hiring practices were incomprehensibly bad and, in some cases, just downright corrupt).

So you deny a programmer -- a domain expert -- 2K of ROM and you get FlickerMan instead of Pac-Man, but hey what does that coder know, anyway? He's just typing bullshit into a computer and anybody can do that. And you give another programmer maybe six weeks to write something that should take four months minimum, because that guy is always complaining and how hard could it really be? And the company crashes, and you skate off to Burger King and sell plastic toys to screaming kids and you think it's the same thing. "What? None of that stuff back there at Atari was my fault, it was all the self-important geeks who just didn't listen."

I remember being chastised for writing a game in 5 months. They wanted it in six weeks, and I told them it couldn't be done. They wanted to add three or four more programmers to make the work go faster (sorry, I've already taught two of my co-workers to program this machine, I don't have time to do that again). I gave them a day-by-day schedule and they actually accepted it (which later surprised me).

Atari marketing was full of this:

- The marketing genius who wanted to print out and copyright all possible 8x8 four-color (maybe five-color) bitmaps, as some kind of pre-emption against the competition. I am not kidding about this. Had to do some math in front of him to show how much paper it actually was (it doesn't outweigh the Earth, but only a few orders of magnitude).

[edit: my bad, I did the math for a monochrome bitmap. If we'd printed it out it would have weighed significantly more than the solar system. Let's go put all the marketing people on their own Dyson Sphere, okay? :-) ]

- The marketroid who decided that the Home Computer Division would no longer make any more games with shooting (result: a bunch of shitty games that never shipped, and some that did ship and made me sad).

- The team that added a "Help" button to the Atari computers, and expected help to magically just happen on already shipped software. For a long time, that button did absolutely nothing at all.

I wanted to work on games and computers, but these people made it awfully hard.

I don't think it was ever in doubt, or really an urban legend. It was an openly reported fact at the time, in multiple newspapers, and confirmed by an Atari spokesperson. The Alamogordo Daily News ran a series of articles, and the main controversy at the time was local indignation that Atari might be dumping electronic waste in New Mexico without permits, which led to some changes in dumping laws. That a bunch of unsold E.T. cartridges were among the waste was reported matter-of-factly, and only seems to have gained mythical status sometime later, as a kind of symbol of the '83 crash. And then that mythical status morphed into people doubting that it happened at all! But now they dug it up and found exactly what the 1983 newspapers said.

It's being reported as having confirmed something that was previously mere rumor or legend, but it wasn't actually very mysterious or hidden at the time.

That was my recollection too -- it was an only slightly remarkable thing at the time, mostly because such a high profile title was such a dud that it was literally buried.

I recall Apple did the same thing with its stock of Mac XLs (which is to say, Lisas with the ROMs replaced and the twiggy drives swapped for a 3.5" floppy). Wait til these guys hear about that.

I think there were legal reasons, as somebody else pointed out, it might have been the only way to declare them as a financial loss.

there is a fantastic article about fixing bugs in the game, I am pretty sure that HN will appreciate:

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

I actually liked the E.T. game. It was probably one of the games I played the most as a child (next to Pitfall). Pac Man, on the other hand, was terrible on the Atari.

Atari Pac-Man was terrible, but my dad loved it. My first Atari (along with that game and many others) ended up in the closet throughout the 80s. In the early 90s, while I was playing SNES with all of my high school friends, my dad pulled the Atari out of the closet to "show us kids a real game". Apparently he had grown up on arcade Pac-Man in the 70s, and found the Atari Pac-Man to be much more difficult and therefore a worthy challenge.

Me too. I was a kid. I got 2 games a year, one for Xmas and one for my birthday. Even if the game wasn't fun I would have played it to death.

I just don't understand why anyone would want to find the games. Is it just for the documentary? I'm sure there's all sorts of 'new old stock' in landfills all over the world. Stuff much more interesting than a [very] bad video game for a console very few of us still have.

I suppose it wouldn't surprise me if limited edition numbered authentic landfill ET cartridges were a sought after collectible in the near or distant future.

Microsoft. It is a convoluted PR stunt for Xbox.

http://www.tekrevue.com/excavate-atari-landfill/

http://www.vg247.com/2014/04/10/microsoft-invites-you-to-att...

Everyone, including HN, is falling for it.

Keith Schofield did a fun little music video about this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rt_3_bQVJU

Here's a video showing various "Easter eggs" inside the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUsgtNxCOOk

I remember playing the game for hours and thinking that was my fault not understanding or having fun with the game... I laughed a few years ago when I read the real story.

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