Salvagers to dig for lost E.T. video game

A city in New Mexico has given permission for a Canadian company to search one of its landfill sites for consignments of lost Atari video games.

Among the games is thought to be Atari's notorious take on the movie 'E.T. the extra-terrestrial', often dubbed the worst video game of all time.

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The site in Alamogordo, south of Albuquerque, is where nine articulated lorries full of copies of the failed game were sent for disposal in 1983.

Now Fuel Industries, a Canadian multi-media company, are hoping that they can unearth the missing game cartridges and have been given six months to search the landfill site.

They will also make a documentary about their search.

The game, which now has a cult following, was made in 1982 to be played on the Atari 2600, with the company paying director Steven Spielberg tens of millions of dollars for the rights to his movie.

Howard Scott Warshaw was the designer of the game, but after Atari signed the deal to make E.T. for its games system, Warshaw was only given five weeks to develop the game in time for release at Christmas in 1982.

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The failure of the game is one of the biggest in video game history, and is thought to have contributed to the decline of Atari and the video game crash of 1983 in the US, where the value of the industry fell by 97 per cent in just two years from $3.2 billion to around $100 million.

The production costs of the E.T. game alone were estimated to be $125 million.

It sold 1.5 million copies due to the initial buzz around the game, but Atari ended up with between 2.5 and 3.5 million copies unsold.