One of gaming’s greatest myths unearthed.
Nowadays Atari is just a brand name, sold on to various companies over the years and now in the possession of French game publisher Infogrames. But the power of the brand stems from the days when Atari WAS the console industry, the entry point for many people into the world of videogames, part of gaming DNA.
Despite its years of success, one event has come to symbolise the demise of the Atari empire, a seemingly mythical tale of corporate failure that started with the acquisition of a license to make a game based on the ET movie and ended in a landfill in New Mexico.
It’s a story that is usually told as ‘ET was like the worst game ever, so bad Atari dumped truckloads of cartridges in the middle of the desert’. Like all good myths its veracity has been doubted, however one enterprising computer programmer has started a personal quest to discover the specifics behind the desert tale.
His website chronicles the events leading up to the dumping, and highlights the downward spiral Atari took when rampant commercialism forever changed its corporate culture. What’s more, he has tracked down and talked to some people involved in the dumping, and even provides evidence for the location of the site via Google Earth and old photographs. It is a work in progress, and I keenly await the outcomes of his search, like many gamers do.
It’s a fascinating read for those who grew up with the Atari 2600 - it’s made me want to don my ‘Kaboom!’ t-shirt and reinduce my childhood bouts of game-derived tendonitis. It also highlights some mistakes that modern games companies still have to avoid making. One constant source of amusement to me is that despite the tales of an ET driven corporate collapse, movie licenses are still more often than not treated as guaranteed cash, with gameplay given a secondary concern.
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