|
Post by 1983parrothead on Apr 26, 2014 18:46:08 GMT -5
They talked about it on NBC Nightly News today.
|
|
|
Post by vetus on Apr 26, 2014 19:17:05 GMT -5
I wonder how much it would sell at eBay.
|
|
|
Post by Garamoth on Apr 26, 2014 19:32:17 GMT -5
Autographed by E.T. itself?
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Joestar on Apr 26, 2014 19:51:36 GMT -5
Literally, an autographed turd.
|
|
|
Post by 1upsuper on Apr 26, 2014 19:58:21 GMT -5
I have no idea what that signature says.
|
|
|
Post by Scylla on Apr 26, 2014 19:58:57 GMT -5
While I understand why people find this interesting, as it's probably the most colorful story from that period in video game history, I agree that it's pointless to dig them up. I understand that a lot of people, misguidedly, believed the story to be a false urban legend and wanted to see if it's really true, but 1) wouldn't that kill the mystery? and 2) uh, if you know anything about what happened during the crash, you'd know that it was well-documented that Atari trashed a ton of games in a New Mexico landfill so there was never any mystery to begin with. For people who are seemingly interested in video game history, it's sad how much hyperbole and misinformation they throw around. How the story of the landfill turned into an "urban legend" I'll never know. And then there's all the talk as if E.T. singlehandedly "killed" the industry (which was never really killed, Japanese games were taking off and the Western market shifted more to computers; it just took a little time for the home console market in the US to clean shop and recover), and how supposedly these games were selling like crap with constant returns so that's why Atari had to dump them. Uh, E.T. is common as shit, even subtracting out all that was dumped. Logically, anyone can realize that that means it sold very well and copies that got returned to Atari were probably just a fraction of what was sold. The true problem is that Atari WAY overestimated the market with several games and manufactured an absurd amount of copies, to the point that even if the game sells bucketloads there are still tons leftover. If I recall correctly, they actually produced more copies of E.T. (and maybe some other games too?) than 2600 systems that had been sold. And don't get me started on these kids that are convinced that E.T. is the "worst game ever" when they know absolutely nothing about it and have never even played it in order to come to any opinion, good or bad. So yeah... practically everything you will ever read or hear about E.T. or even the crash as a whole these days is nonsense because people are more interested in contorting some sort of "legend" than learning actual facts (which is sad, because there are a lot of beneficial lessons that can be learned by both players and developers from the history of games). I imagine that the pure market saturation would instead cause a massive price crash on eBay for ET cartridges, in what would be later called a cruelly ironic repeat of history. It's pretty hard to have a massive price crash on something that you can get for 99 cents to begin with.
|
|
|
Post by Scylla on Apr 26, 2014 20:00:28 GMT -5
I have no idea what that signature says. "Yours Truly, HSW" AKA Howard Scott Warshaw, the creator of E.T.
|
|
|
Post by 1upsuper on Apr 26, 2014 20:01:54 GMT -5
^ Thank you. Is that how he always signs it, or could he not be bothered to include his whole name?
|
|
|
Post by Scylla on Apr 26, 2014 20:03:22 GMT -5
He pretty commonly goes by "HSW", yeah.
|
|
|
Post by jorpho on Apr 26, 2014 23:19:27 GMT -5
I seem to recall a bunch of reports that everything was run over with a steamroller. I'm thinking there's still a decent chance this will turn out to be a hoax. If I recall correctly, they actually produced more copies of E.T. (and maybe some other games too?) than 2600 systems that had been sold. I believe you're thinking of Pac-Man. I don't think there were quite that many copies of E.T.
|
|
|
Post by Ike on Apr 26, 2014 23:58:08 GMT -5
I wonder how this is going to impact the AVGN movie. Isn't the whole premise that he's hunting for the E.T. graveyard?
|
|
|
Post by Gendo Ikari on Apr 27, 2014 2:18:30 GMT -5
What to say other than "his loss"? Is there seriously people losing their shit because their beloved AVGN won't be the one with the honor of the discovery?
As Succubus said a few post above, this is a truth that became legend because of some exaggerations. If there's really such a big stock of unsold cartridges dumped there, I doubt they'd have spent too much time compacting them more than the minimum necessary; after all, the operation was a nit hush-hush. Those stuff has also stayed three decades in an anaerobic environment, in a place with very dry climate, and further covered by a layer of concrete. If anything, it shows how much garbage can last...
|
|
|
Post by Scylla on Apr 27, 2014 2:45:53 GMT -5
If I recall correctly, they actually produced more copies of E.T. (and maybe some other games too?) than 2600 systems that had been sold. I believe you're thinking of Pac-Man. I don't think there were quite that many copies of E.T. Ah, you're right, which makes sense given the already established popularity of Pac-Man. Here's the graph from the E.T. article here on HG101: So it looks like they manufactured around 4 million copies of E.T.? 1.5 million is still a very successful title back in those days (even now too), so if they weren't completely boneheaded, they could've done very well with those sales figures. Those figures for Asteroids and Pac-Man are great, most publishers would kill for sales like those (to put it into perspective, only two PS3 games have outsold 2600 Pac-Man), yet look at how much more they manufactured on top of what they sold. Close to 50% got trashed. They really expected to sell 13 million copies of Pac-Man? In the entire history of gaming, how many games have actually sold that many or more? I bet it's less than 50. And we're talking worldwide sales, at which the 2600 is at a disadvantage because it wasn't exactly a major player in every region. The whole situation just boggles the mind.
|
|
|
Post by vetus on Apr 27, 2014 8:31:37 GMT -5
I'm still amazed about how they expected to sell so many E.T. and Pac-Man copies without putting any effort at them. I wonder how this is going to impact the AVGN movie. Isn't the whole premise that he's hunting for the E.T. graveyard? I don't think that it's going to affect AVGN movie since it's going to be a comical, surreal movie and not a serious, documentary movie. Not that the whole "documentary" about digging up Atari landfill can be taken seriously but you know what I mean.
|
|
BdR
Junior Member
Posts: 94
|
Post by BdR on Apr 27, 2014 9:19:39 GMT -5
So it looks like they manufactured around 4 million copies of E.T.? 1.5 million is still a very successful title back in those days (even now too), so if they weren't completely boneheaded, they could've done very well with those sales figures. Those figures for Asteroids and Pac-Man are great, most publishers would kill for sales like those (to put it into perspective, only two PS3 games have outsold 2600 Pac-Man), yet look at how much more they manufactured on top of what they sold. Close to 50% got trashed. They really expected to sell 13 million copies of Pac-Man? In the entire history of gaming, how many games have actually sold that many or more? I bet it's less than 50. And we're talking worldwide sales, at which the 2600 is at a disadvantage because it wasn't exactly a major player in every region. The whole situation just boggles the mind. The hubris and overconfidence of Atari by that time is amazing (it makes me think of Enron). And I think there's an interesting parallel to be made between Atari and Nintendo here. On the one hand, Pac-Man on the 2600 had flopped and Atari went on to repeat its mistakes with E.T. and finally thrashed all the hardware by dumping it in a landfill. On the other hand, when Nintendo was facing the failure of its Radar Scope arcade game in North America, they didn't just throw away the hardware but recycled it by making conversion kits turning it into Donkey Kong. This difference in mentality is probably what caused Nintendo to end up on top by the late 1980s.
|
|