I'm both amazed and disappointed that this urban legend turned out to be true. The former because who the would do that in the first place? The latter because who the would do that in the first place?
The Benefit of Doubt: Nobody knew how to market video games yet. Their failures taught Nintendo and Sega how to.
Seriously though: I KNOW RIGHT?! You can't sell more items than your market has consumers. That is unless you're expecting them to break your item out of frustration and then replace it.
Well, there's "benefit of doubt," and then there's "anybody who played this game for more than five minutes would realize that it's unshippable garbage".
Except that marketing guys wanted their bonuses, and didn't know shit about games, and furthermore they didn't care (because Atari's hiring practices were incomprehensibly bad and, in some cases, just downright corrupt).
So you deny a programmer -- a domain expert -- 2K of ROM and you get FlickerMan instead of Pac-Man, but hey what does that coder know, anyway? He's just typing bullshit into a computer and anybody can do that. And you give another programmer maybe six weeks to write something that should take four months minimum, because that guy is always complaining and how hard could it really be? And the company crashes, and you skate off to Burger King and sell plastic toys to screaming kids and you think it's the same thing. "What? None of that stuff back there at Atari was my fault, it was all the self-important geeks who just didn't listen."
I remember being chastised for writing a game in 5 months. They wanted it in six weeks, and I told them it couldn't be done. They wanted to add three or four more programmers to make the work go faster (sorry, I've already taught two of my co-workers to program this machine, I don't have time to do that again). I gave them a day-by-day schedule and they actually accepted it (which later surprised me).
Atari marketing was full of this:
- The marketing genius who wanted to print out and copyright all possible 8x8 four-color (maybe five-color) bitmaps, as some kind of pre-emption against the competition. I am not kidding about this. Had to do some math in front of him to show how much paper it actually was (it doesn't outweigh the Earth, but only a few orders of magnitude).
[edit: my bad, I did the math for a monochrome bitmap. If we'd printed it out it would have weighed significantly more than the solar system. Let's go put all the marketing people on their own Dyson Sphere, okay? :-) ]
- The marketroid who decided that the Home Computer Division would no longer make any more games with shooting (result: a bunch of shitty games that never shipped, and some that did ship and made me sad).
- The team that added a "Help" button to the Atari computers, and expected help to magically just happen on already shipped software. For a long time, that button did absolutely nothing at all.
I wanted to work on games and computers, but these people made it awfully hard.
I don't think it was ever in doubt, or really an urban legend. It was an openly reported fact at the time, in multiple newspapers, and confirmed by an Atari spokesperson. The Alamogordo Daily News ran a series of articles, and the main controversy at the time was local indignation that Atari might be dumping electronic waste in New Mexico without permits, which led to some changes in dumping laws. That a bunch of unsold E.T. cartridges were among the waste was reported matter-of-factly, and only seems to have gained mythical status sometime later, as a kind of symbol of the '83 crash. And then that mythical status morphed into people doubting that it happened at all! But now they dug it up and found exactly what the 1983 newspapers said.
It's being reported as having confirmed something that was previously mere rumor or legend, but it wasn't actually very mysterious or hidden at the time.
That was my recollection too -- it was an only slightly remarkable thing at the time, mostly because such a high profile title was such a dud that it was literally buried.
I recall Apple did the same thing with its stock of Mac XLs (which is to say, Lisas with the ROMs replaced and the twiggy drives swapped for a 3.5" floppy). Wait til these guys hear about that.
I'm not amazed, but I was at Atari when these were being landfilled.
Atari was falling apart amazingly fast, and losing about a million dollars a day toward the end (whereupon, massive layoffs, and some of us got to work for Jack Tramiel, while others got to stay in Atari Coin-op).
Well this happened back when we really didn't give a shit about the environment AND just before conspicuous consumption more or less defined the 80s.
What I'm dumbfounded by is why they didn't simply give them away? It reminds me of all the stupid YouTube videos of people who wait in line to buy the latest Apple product only to smash it in front of everyone else waiting in line...
Atari games were discounted to $1 or $2 and they were stacked to the celling at major retailers. They sat around discount stores for a decade afterward. There's still warehouses full of them.[1] The company produced millions more games than the number of systems they sold, so who would they have given them too?
It Is a shity game. Allowing people to play it would have been bad for the brand.
Where I work, we(someone) burns the stuff that we can't sell not cause the stuff is bad, it is done to make shore the brand does not get associated with Cheap stuff.
Brand status is important.
(I know it is somewhat insane but it is the way capitalism works)
One of the local super markets sends containers full of new TVs, washing machines, and more, to the local scrap yard. They didn't sell them within the period that they expected, and instead of discounting them (which would drive away consumers from more expensive products), they 'recycle' them.
Which is not to say it was impossible in the early '80s to not give a shit about the environment, just that by that point ignorance really wasn't a good excuse anymore.
Of course it doesn't change the fact that what was shipped on the cartridges 30 years ago was crap, or the fact it took 30 years for someone to decide to fix it. Atari's decision remains the same, in my opinion.
