This is a story with a little bit of everything: romance, scandal, shame and mystery. And there’s even an important lesson to be learned.
No, no. I’m not talking about Donald Sterling. I’m referring to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial video game, and why nearly a million copies of it were secretly buried in the New Mexico desert.
It’s not that the game snitched on Tony Soprano or anything. E.T.’s Jimmy Hoffa moment was simply the result of fickle entertainment tastes, overblown expectations and the fact that the game just wasn’t very good.
The story begins in the summer of 1982, just as the world had fallen in love with a certain stout little alien with long fingers from a movie you may have heard of. Steven Spielberg’s flick that year was a massive hit, and Atari—the age’s undisputed video game king—decided it just had to have a game based on the movie. And it had to be ready to go by the Christmas buying season. So on July 27, Howard Scott Warshaw (creator of Yars’ Revenge and the Raiders of the Lost Ark video game) was brought in to bring E.T. to gaming life—by Sept. 1.
A month.
Games today can take years to make. And even back in 1982, when the art of game design was still in its stick figure stage, creating a game from scratch still typically took several months. But Warshaw rose to the challenge, ignored Spielberg’s advice (who wanted something like Pac-Man) and worked feverishly for a couple of weeks. And once it was done, Atari was so sure the thing was going to be a massive hit that it produced millions of cartridges in preparation for surely dizzying demand.
And when kids unwrapped their E.T. games Christmas morning and began to play, the screen looked like this:
The object of the game was, apparently, for E.T. to search for pieces of his interstellar phone in forests and big pits. Critics called it “monotonous,” “time-consuming” and, eventually, “the worst video game ever.” Its release either triggered or coincided with what’s been called the video game crash of 1983. While 1.5 million E.T. games were eventually sold, millions more were left on the shelves, unloved and unable to call home. Ever. Atari lost about $100 million on that sweet little alien and, if you haven’t noticed, has never been quite the same since.
It wasn’t long before whispers began of a secret burial near Alamogordo, N.M., where thousands or millions or perhaps billions (you know how these urban legends go) of the E.T. cartridges were buried in a landfill in the thick of night—perhaps with everyone involved wearing hazmat suits while they covered over the place in concrete. But for years, and then decades, the whispers were just that. No one would talk about it. No one apparently even knew, or would admit to, the truth.
Until now.
A few days ago, a documentary film crew unearthed hundreds of games in said landfill—just the beginning of a treasure trove of unwanted cartridges. For most, perhaps, the find was no big deal. But for some, the discovery ranked just below the excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Oddly enough, one of the entities involved with the doc is a video game company: It’s expected to be released on Microsoft’s Xbox One.
So, after all that, what’s the lesson? It tells me that there is no such thing as a sure thing in the world of entertainment. Tastes can change rapidly, and that no matter how popular a brand may be, consumers ultimately gravitate toward and stay loyal to brands because of their quality, not their promotional heft.
It’s an important cautionary tale, really, in our age of sequels and cross-merchandising and über-dependency on brands. We love bits of entertainment because there was something inside them that makes them lovable. The LEGO Movie worked because it retained the geeky charm of the toys. If crossover specialists strip away the very thing that made something special and turn it into something unrecognizable—be we talking about The Lone Ranger or Battleship or even Noah—well, there are going to be problems.
Oh, and it also reminds me that, sometimes, there are bits of entertainment that deserve to be buried.
Recent Comments