Posted on 04/28/2014 12:59:36 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
... About 200 of residents and game enthusiasts gathered early Saturday in southeastern New Mexico to watch backhoes and bulldozers dig through the concrete-covered landfill in search of up to a million discarded copies of “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” that the game’s maker wanted to hide forever....
The “E.T.” game is among the factors blamed for the decline of Atari and the collapse in the U.S. of a multi-million dollar video game industry that didn’t bounce back for several years.
Tina Amini, deputy editor at gaming website Kotaku, said the game tanked because “it was practically broken.” A recurring flaw, she said, was that the character of the game, the beloved extraterrestrial, would fall into traps that were almost impossible to escape and would appear constantly and unpredictably.
The company produced millions of cartridges, and although sales were not initially bad, the frustrating gameplay prompted an immense amount of returns. “They had produced so many cartridges that were unsold that even if the game was insanely successful I doubt they’d be able to keep up,” Amini says....
(Excerpt) Read more at business.financialpost.com ...
Maybe they can put the same effort towards locating Barry Soetoro's birth certificate?
...especially when pristine copies probably exist in game collectors’ hoards. It must be for the history.
I loved getting those floppies from magazines, my friends gave me dozens of them, reformat and use. Don’t miss the puny, lo-cap storage but free was fun! I still marvel at these USB flash drives holding dozens of gigs, amazing, considering my 1st IDE hard drive held all of 1.2 GB and cost over $280!
I recall trying to play that E.T. game on Atari. It never made any sense to me. Perhaps that’s why they thought it best to just dump it.
I don’t know, never played home consoles when they were new. Not every game is gonna attain a Pac-Man level of success. The only reason to trash what they did is they knew Atari was doomed, and dumped it to clean house. Who knows, eh?
Will Whorealdo be there?
...I wonder if "ET" (the movie) is getting re-released soon. This is an awful lot of effort and hype for something that, frankly, was so valuable at the time that it was cheaper to BURY truckloads of copies, than try to sell them.
My first hard drive held, wait for it, 10 megabytes. And I never filled it.
I bought it to run a pharmacology teaching program that cost $900 and came on 8 floppy discs.
It's different today but back in those days, kids weren't as technical and just wanted simple games. Games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders, etc.
I hope the documentary is interesting.
This laptop is almost 4 years, been saving lots and am only up to 70GB, got twice that to go.
I’ve got some vintage ads saved, a 10MB HDD for $3398, a 15MB @ $2495+ install kit[s] from Radio Shack, and other old tech. I finally learned, when it comes to new tech, wait 3-6 months, it’ll cost a third of the price. Too soon old, too late smart. ;)
:’)
Who'd want to?
I remember a bon mot in one of John Dvorak’s columns years ago — that the software industry is great, where else can you take a 50 cent diskette, put it in a $2 box, sell it for $500, and spend the rest of your time complaining that you can’t make any money? ;’)
I’d be surprised if these things didn’t work, and that includes the hardware they run on.
Maybe it’s one of those ironic hipster things. Once you have the thick frame black glasses and fedora, ya gotta do something.
I am ever so curious as to which game you wrote... Do tell!
My first hard drive was a Syquest I believe, 44 mb, running on an Apple II, so, ProDOS’ max volume size was 32 mb. I forget how much it cost, the cartridges were 5.25 winchesters in a plastic box, and they worked great, and were what back then seemed like ridiculously portable. The printing / rendering biz’s around Grand Rapids all have ‘em, because at that time 44 mb would hold a huge amount of graphics and publisher files.
The first ad I remember for a one gig drive was in one of the deep geek mags, and priced (if memory serves) $10K — but we were all in awe, you can run an entire company on a one gig (and back then, one could). Now a camera, or phone, or even a wristwatch, comes with more than 1 gb. Anyway, the price came down fast.
The first retail terabyte drive I saw was $400, and that seemed hilarious. Now 1 tb is well under $100 (internal or external) and 128 gb flash drives are available. A four pack of 8 gb Sandisk Facets is $22 and change at, uh, one of the warehouse clubs.
SanDisc just released a 128GB Class 10 Micro SD card. It;'s priced at $ 120 at Amazon, retails at $200.
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