Here's a video showing various "Easter eggs" inside the game:
E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill
#42I'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?
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...
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."
Re: E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill
#43This 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. The…
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.
Re: E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill
#44I 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…
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 is to recycle old discarded stuff.
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
Re: E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill
#45I'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?
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.
Re: E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill
#46I'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?
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...
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.
Re: E.T. cartridges found in infamous Atari landfill
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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.