From Web Pro News
A new documentary is looking to discover the truth behind the legend. The movie, directed by Zak Penn (writer on screenplays such as X-Men: The Last Stand and creator of the Alphas TV show), will cover the excavation of the alleged Atari dump site.
Though the production reportedly ran into trouble getting permission for the excavation, the event is now scheduled to take place on April 26. Gaming fans are now being invited to come to the dig site and watch as the truth comes out. The day-long excavation will take place from 9:30 am to 7:30 pm at the Alamogordo Landfill.
This entire endeavor is being funded in part by Microsoft's Xbox Entertainment Studios as part of its new documentaries initiative. The company will be producing a documentary series that will air first on Xbox consoles.
The news has been addressed by a number of sites .
Is this newsworthy, or should we have just left this tired dinosaur buried?
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In a followup to our previous coverage on the search, a legendary trove of Atari's E.T. The Extraterrestrial video game has at long last been unearthed. The Associated Press reports that a documentary film production company dug the huge stash of game cartridges out of a landfill in Alamagordo, New Mexico on Saturday, confirming rumors that had circulated for decades regarding the fate of the notoriously terrible game.
Now let me get my 2600 hooked up and we are good to go!
(Score: 1) by Woods on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:21PM
I just want to get a cartridge and frame it above the mantle, right next to my copy of "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing".
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:41PM
There is nothing there, its a myth. Sorry there is no link as it was pre-net but there was an article in the early 90s about the landfill legend and they managed to get a hold of one of the guys who worked at the factory who explained "Uhhh...it doesn't work that way". According to him because the chips in the carts were so expensive back them and most of it was COTS that could easily be reused...it was. The carts sent back would be popped open, run through a reflow oven to get the solder off and then the chips were removed and re-binned. memory, boards, hell even the cases were reused so according to him all that would be dumped would be the obviously broken crap, cracked boards, bad caps, and the manuals and boxes.
So all this work and most likely we are gonna have another Al Capone's vault, just some old junk, busted boards, and if they are very lucky a few manuals to some 2600 titles.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Woods on Wednesday April 16 2014, @09:08PM
Dang it... And THEN all the people that somehow got a hold of a cartridge will put theirs up for sale for millions, thus crashing the economy and causing the next great depression, and then WWIII.
That game really IS the worst thing ever.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:53AM
You make a funny but I firmly believe there IS a place for bad games, just as there is a place for bad movies.
Me personally I LOVE to pick up some cheapo cheesy FPS or third person shooter for the PC...why? Because its fun to MST3K the hell out of it, that's why. Ever play Kane & Lynch II? You'll laugh your ass off as your guy stands not 30 feet from an enemy, empties a full clip on an Uzi and...hits nothing. Seriously all the guns are THAT off, oh and at the same time the shotgun? Can drop a guy from 40+ yards using buckshot.
Or if you want to laugh your ass off while going "WTF were these guys smoking?" try You Are Empty, the best $3 (99c with $2 shipping) I have EVAR spent! For those that haven't heard of it (a good 99.995% of you I'd wager) its a Russian shooter set in an alternative 1950s USSR with a plot that makes Videodrome look sensible. You battle things like 20 foot tall mutant attack chickens and old coots that go "booga booga!". Yes you read that right, you go to a farm where there are 20 foot tal mutant attack chickens and crazy coots that go booga booga, while each cut scene is filled with more WHAT THE FUCK??? than an LSD trip. For just one example a scene has a kid look at a puppy in the window of a petshop and when the kid walks away the puppy proceeds to bash its own head in on the glass while creepy music plays. Is it explained? Oh fuck no, where would the fun in that be?
So just because a game is bad or obscure doesn't mean you can't get some serious fun out of it. Who knows, you might even find a lost gem like "Nosferatu, The Wrath Of Malachi" which frankly is one of the scariest games I ever played. Imagine what it would REALLY be like if your average person was to walk into a 1930s universal horror castle filled with master vampires and other nasties...lets just say your ass had BETTER learn how to be quiet and sneak, otherwise some demon will be wearing your guts as a hat!
As for the ET game? I had it and yes it was lame...but no lamer than a good 70% that came out for the 2600, there was probably 3 shitty games for every 1 decent on that platform. People have forgotten how many truly shittastic games there was on that platform, especially compared to something like the sadly short lived but excellent ColecoVision. For every Activision you had a dozen US Games cranking out the same tired ass one screen garbage. I swear a good 70% of the games on the 2600 were so short you'd have seen all the content in the first 2 minutes and after that it was just repetition. The only really good thing about the 2600 after 1980 was when the big crash happened i was able to buy games at 5 for a buck at the local magic mart, I ended up walking out of that store with something like $1000 worth of carts and handheld games for like $5, just a damned shame I didn't think to hang onto them, could have probably bought a new car with 'em off of eBay.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Woods on Thursday April 17 2014, @01:04PM
Oh no doubt bad games have a place. In one of my comments above I mentioned Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. I had to hunt it down on Ebay or Amazon, and I paid like $30 for it, but it is without a doubt the worst game made for PC. It appears that when they were developing it, they finished the graphics, and some of the code, and then decided to release the game.
There are no collision checks, with anything.
There is no difference between driving on the road, and driving on any other surface, including cliffs.
You can accelerate in reverse... Indefinitely. And then as soon as you let go of the reverse button, you stop instantly.
Man that game was a wreck, I only mentioned the three issues I remember off the top of my head, but there really no redeeming qualities to it. (Except for breaking physics)
If you get bored, you may look up a video review of it so you can see just how broken it is.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:47PM
Wow...I can't believe you paid $30 for it, I was given that one for free and ended up chunking it. There is a difference between a bad game and a broken one and Big Rigs is firmly in the latter. I like a bad game that is bad because someone has no taste, not because it just doesn't work. I played Big Rigs twice and I never got the other rig to even move off the starting line so there really wasn't even a point in playing it except to just drive through everything and that is only good for a couple minutes entertainment at best.
If you want to try a "funny broken" riding game try Ride To Hell:Retribution as THAT is funny. The bike sounds like a lawnmower, every vehicle you bump explodes like its got a tank full of nitro, the plot has holes you could drive a big rig through (yes thank you for saving me from being raped by killing that guy, in return for your kindness lets have sex next to the rapist's corpse) and the whole thing comes off like it was written by a 14 year old whose only "interaction" with women is from Skinimax.
Just looking through my Steam at some titles worthy of a good MST3King...Bulletstorm (game tries to take itself serious while having "blown out your butt" style achievements and dialog like "I'm gonna kill your dick!") F.E.A.R 3 (lets turn a scary single player game into a dudebro game where you can't even play as the best character,what a concept!) Hunted:Demon's Forge (picture COD where you are a slow moving guy with an axe against a dozen guys at a time with bows) Darksiders (like God Of War but even less involving) Risen 1&2 (crazy pop-up, characters all look alike, battles become a race to see who can stunlock the other guy) and for sheer "WTF were they smoking?" Zeno Clash 1 &2 which...fuck just go look up a video, i don't even know how you'd describe the weirdness that is Zeno. Not a bad game like the others, just seriously fucking WEIRD.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by dotdotdot on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:33PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:07PM
Some of the games from that era so horrid, I think the landfill is unfortunately the right place for them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid retro computing/gaming guy, with multiple old Atari 2600's, DOS gaming rigs, etc. I think, though, that some of my first semester programming students build more engaging games on the command line with python than some of the crap that precipitated the crash in the '80s.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by TK on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:06PM
"Retro gamers" have a convenient filter called "the past" that keeps the truly awful games from ever even crossing their paths. (Who would want to emulate a game they didn't enjoy?)
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by hatta on Wednesday April 16 2014, @09:32PM
We also have a huge list of ROMs, from which we choose randomly quite often. Most of the fun is in playing things you missed back in the day anyway. And the games that I've never heard of are the most intriguing of all.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by paulej72 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:34PM
Someone actually went out of there way to fix the bugs in E.T. http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ [neocomputer.org].
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 1) by hb253 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @09:07PM
So true. My best friend in high school had a 2600, but I hated playing it because the joysticks were torture devices, the sound was just some bleeps and bloops, and the graphics were blocky. I was used to the arcade machines that had much better graphics and sound.
The firings and offshore outsourcing will not stop until morale improves.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:10PM
not a link to Geraldo opening the Capone safe....
(Score: 1) by GlennC on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:37PM
If enough people are interested in this to pay for having the site excavated, it's happening.
If it's happening, it's news to some. At least, if you accept that news is a recounting of the events of the day.
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by MrGuy on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:52PM
...the currently buried Atari cartridges will be taken as souvenirs by the assembled gaming fans. Who will later tire of them, given their lack of hardware to play them on and the general crappiness of the game itself. Causing the cartridges to be re-distributed in much smaller quantities to a much greater number of landfills throughout the country.
The circle of trash. It moves us all.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:58PM
Anyone old enough to remember that?? I wonder if it will have a similar outcome . . .
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:07PM
You mean somehow turning Geraldo Rivera into a war correspondent?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:29PM
I also remember when George Newman unlocked the mysteries of Al Capone's glove compartment: Road maps!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by e_armadillo on Wednesday April 16 2014, @06:26PM
I should have read to the bottom before posting :(
But, yeah I had the exact same thought, a bunch of hype with a whole bunch of fizzle at the end.
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:05PM
Do you sell in fear of the vintage cartridge market flooding or hold and hope nothing is uncovered that damages the value of your own (hopefully pristine/ultrarare) stock?
Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:08PM
Luckily mine are still mint in box.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:33PM
...Microsoft are paying for a film about rubbish games that won't include any of their own.
(Score: 3, Funny) by useless on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:36PM
They just want physical proof that there were games made worse than theirs
(Score: 3, Interesting) by len_harms on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:59PM
I know I am in the minority on this one...
For the time E.T. was an 'ok' game, I know I played it many times. In fact not much different than the raiders of the lost ark 2600 game. In fact the gameplay was a bit sharper and easier to follow.
It has however not aged well (many 2600 games are like that). It was also a bit on the heavy handed side on its collision detection.
It was a massive financial failure however. As apparently they printed more carts than there were 2600's (hence the landfill)... Somehow that has morphed into it was a crappy game.
It was even fairly easy to beat if you read the instruction manual.
Considering most 2600 games were prototype to on the assembly line in 4-6 weeks its surprising how many good ones they did manage to make.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday April 17 2014, @01:21AM
A lot of people forget just how cool some games were on the Atari 2600.
Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Mario Brothers, Crystal Castles, Phoenix, Millipede, and Centipede were all made by Atari in house, and obviously adapted from the arcade versions themselves.
All unique game play, and made it pretty cool to own one. There's Pitfall, Jungle Hunt, Burger Time, Frogger, and Bump N' Jump, and a good list of others that were produced.
In fact, the coolest thing about the Atari 2600 at the time was just how many arcade games you could play while eating pizza with your friends, and then come home, and play it some more FOR FREE.
Children these day will never understand the ridiculously awesome feeling it was to be able to keep your quarters to spend on something other than your next attempt at Pac-Man's kill screen.
I can play Dig Dug *today* and have just as much fun with it as I did when I was a child.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:29AM
That generation of home computing was just before my time, I grew up with a Commodore 64, but a friend had an Intellivision and I have many happy memories of the games on that system, Ice Trek and D&D Advance (the top-down view version) being the stand-out "I completed that game, it is my bitch!" moments. I tend to find the ones that aged well are the ones that were designed to fit the limitations of the whole setup, rather than pushing too hard and becoming overcomplex.
Been thinking about coding myself up a remake of Hacker II for a while now, really should just get on and do it - teach these young turks that hard games existed before Dark Souls.
(Score: 1) by e_armadillo on Wednesday April 16 2014, @06:06PM
But then all they would find is a coffee cup, but no cartridges . . . never mind
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"