Raiders of the Lost Cart

In 1982, with Christmas rapidly approaching, Atari began
work on a game based on the ultra-popular film, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.  After paying a reported twenty-five million
dollars for the game rights, Atari gave programmer Howard Scott Warsaw a scant
six weeks to complete the title. Warsaw’s past success, Yar’s Revenge, took at
least five months to complete; his adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, seven
months.

With little time, Warsaw was forced to make a very
simplistic game. E.T. the Extraterrestrial , centered around the main character
repeated falling into pits, collection pieces of a phone, and occasioning
collecting Reese’s Pieces to restore health. There was only one problem- with
such a short schedule, focus testing had to be skipped. It wasn’t until after
the game’s release that a horrible secret was discovered- the game was virtually
unplayable. Players had to levitate out of pits, a very frustrating task,
especially for E.T.’s target demographic- six to twelve year old children.

Not knowing what a fiasco the final code was, Atari ordered
million of cartridges in time for the Christmas buying rush. However, word of
E.T.’s lackluster gameplay spread quickly and a paltry 1.5 million cartridges
were sold. After experiencing a loss of over $500 million dollars, one of most
famous urban legends of video games was born: Atari had purportedly dumped all
the unsold E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill.

Now, a group of students from Auburn University are
embarking on a journey (and creating an internet documentary in the process) to
uncover the truth about this story. On March 15-23, Steven Clontz, Adam Cooner,
Brent Harrison, and Issac McNeely will make a pilgrimage from Auburn, Alabama
to El Paso, Texas. The project, named E.T.’s March,will follow the path a dozen
18-wheelers had made twenty-six years ago, hopefully closing a chapter on one
of gaming’s most fascinating tales.