The Long-Buried ‘E.T.’ Atari 2600 Cartridges Have Been Found!

Briefly: What an amazing world we live in.

I remember being little and hearing about the great video game crash of the 1980’s, complete with plenty of rumours that hundreds of thousands of copies of the game that caused it, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, were written off, crushed, and buried in a New Mexico landfill.

Turns out that the rumours were true, and Microsoft just dug them up.

Why Microsoft? Well, they’re prepping a lot of cool sounding original content for the Xbox platform, including a documentary about the video game crash entitled Atari: Game Over. The documentary will premiere exclusively on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One later this year.

Xbox Wire has posted some photos of the dig, and notes that “the findings started out very promising, with an old, dusty Atari 2600 joystick buried in the landfill. Then an “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” cartridge. A box. An instruction manual. And the confirmation of “a lot more down there.”

Amazing, right?

Take a look at the photo below, and we’ll be sure to keep you up to date as we learn more. Did you have a copy of E.T. back in the day, or were you smart enough to avoid it? Sound out below!