The home video game market was soaring in 1983, with revenues at about $3.2 billion USD a year. Then the bottom fell out, and by 1985, annual revenues had fallen to about $100 million USD — a crash of almost 97 percent. At around the same time, industry leader Atari took a costly gamble and threw together a game based on the popular 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in just 34 days. But the game bombed, and the company was left with millions of unsold cartridges. Fittingly, Atari quietly dumped the worthless E.T. cartridges into a landfill in southern New Mexico, not far from where aliens reportedly crash-landed in 1947. That unceremonious end to the story was only a rumor for 30 years and considered an urban legend — until an enterprising documentary crew got permission to dig in an Alamogordo landfill in 2014, and found thousands of game cartridges buried there.
Game over:
Atari paid director Steven Spielberg $22 million USD for the rights to make E.T. into a video game. Two years later, Atari was out of business, and the stand-alone video game market faded away.
Nearly 900 unearthed copies of what has been described as the worst video game of all time were later sold on eBay, netting more than $108,000. One E.T. cartridge sold at auction for $1,535.
A documentary about the dig, entitled Atari: Game Over, premiered in 2014. The excavators still have about 300 copies of the game that may be sold at a later date.