1983 was a magical year.
The first Swatch was introduced, I was created in a vat of chemicals and the home video game market had reached critical mass and was imploding in on itself. It really was the apocalypse for a company like Atari, who up until this point, had been the kings of crappy 4 pixel games that people spent billions of dollars a year on.
It’s long been a legend amongst video game collectors and pop culture nerds that when the market tanked Atari had nowhere to put a ton of it’s unsold video games and VCS consoles, including the execrable ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. Thankfully, the internet is full of people with lots of time on their hands and a desire for useless knowledge and from that comes the story of one man’s quest to find out the reality behind the myth.
We applaud him for putting together such a detailed and well laid out site to finally put to rest the mysteries and vagueries of the death of Atari, and we would be his BFF if he would send us one of the salvaged ET cartridges.
