Atari 2600 ET unearthed

Look! The legend is true...Atari E.T. cartridges found at the dump! Details here.

This is a very interesting economics lesson: over production... over predicting demand. and even the market leader can fail.

Ok, 30 years ago there was no internet. If you want to play a game you must own a physical cartridge. And... Atari was pretty much the only game console in town. Its graphics ability is so inferior to games you play with quarters... But given Atari was the only game console even if the game sucks if you want to play you need to put up with it. That Pac-man only face left or right and the ghosts flicker.

Now that home games catch up the arcade industry is totally dead. No one will pay quarters to video games now. But modern games are too immersive you got idiots-who-needs-a-life play all day long.

There was a big 1983 video game crash. Well that wasn't for ME. Most people already played enough and tired of those games but I have not get my hands on it before 1983 unlike the spoiled kids. I spent quite some hours with ancient Atari games until maybe 1986. I did remember seeing a lot of E.T. cartridge available.

E.T. is generally considered the worst game of all time... While it was not super fun, I do think it is not the worst game ever. I was able to finish this I remember. My vote for worst game would be that Swordquest. You basically walk around and have no idea just what you're supposed to do. ok, it is Atari, such low powered machine by today's standard... you just can't expect this to do too much. That Space Invaders and Missile Command were quite successful? But they were so simple! E.T. and even SwordQuest actually has better graphics and have some depth.

Ok I got a question? why dig the garbage for the millions of dumped cartridges?

If you want to play old Atari games, go to atariage.com.

And for those title-inflated senior programmers, architects, software directors who say Atari games suck. I challenge you to write a Pac man game. Even with modern computer with a ton of memory most probably don't even have any clues to where to even start. The Atari has a only few K of memory to work with, for the record, so it is fairly amazing to make a playable game on those old systems.