The ET Dump

One of the greatest and most infamous tech urban legends of all time concerned ET, for the Atari 2600, probably the worst video game ever produced. It's difficult to understand just how horrible the game was if you've never played it. The game was complete rubbish even with the extremely basic gameplay and graphics that Atari was providing. Pixelated ET was attempting to put together a phone and get away from the FBI. You would enter one screen, then another that was nearly identical, and possibly fall through a hole to another screen that was nearly identical. Time and time again.

Both critically and financially, the game failed. After an initial sales surge from delighted fans, it took just six weeks to build, and when everyone discovered the game was terrible, sales crashed. What about trash, by the way? It is dumped. At least, that was the legend. Millions, if not thousands of copies, of unsold books were allegedly discreetly transported to the desert and dumped there to be forgotten. There was no possibility that something so obviously absurd could be real.

After years of rumors, authorization was eventually granted in 2014 for a crew to explore the purported dump site. It turned out that the reports were genuine, and there was a windfall of ancient Atari consoles and games that had been crushed, foremost among them the unsold ET copies that the public had so bitterly despised thirty years previously.