In the 21st Century, when we think of “early video game consoles,” we think quaintly back our box-like gray NES or perhaps our handsome wood-paneled 2600, and we feel a sense of belonging – a sense of rooted nostalgia – in the sense that our childhoods were part of video game history. It’s only right that we do; these and other innovative machines broke new ground for their time and raised the bar for future development. We think of those names… Nintendo, Atari, Sega. Ancient and noble they sound.

The beginning of things was far more humble, but it was a beginning, and a beginning is all it takes.

Ralph Baer, seen here with his “Brown Box” prototype version of the Odyssey.

Born in 1922 in the southwest German town of Rodalben, Ralph H. Baer emigrated with his family to the United States just two months prior to Kristallnacht in 1938. A family of Jewish origin, the Baers feared persecution in Germany and sought a new life in New York. Starting his American dream in a factory at age 12, Ralph eventually graduated from the National Radio Institute in 1940. He went on to be drafted in 1943, assigned to military intelligence in England. GI Bill money enabled him to pursue his Bachelors degree upon returning home to America, which he received in 1949 from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago. By 1956, Baer was working at a New Hampshire defense contractor called Sanders Associates, where he oversaw a crew of some 500 engineers who developed electronics systems for military use.

As a side project, Baer began working on the idea of an electronic home game system in 1966. For three years, he and two associates Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, developed a series of seven prototypes for the device. It was this seventh design, dubbed “The Brown Box,” that the trio successfully pitched to Magnavox in 1971. The California-based consumer electronics company (whose name means “great voice” in Latin) saw merit in the idea of a home arcade that a family could hook up to their own television set. Hands were shaken, paperwork was drafted, and the Age of the Console had begun to rise and shine its first rays over a quiet horizon.

Clockwise from upper left: The original Odyssey suite and packaging; the physical paraphernalia for various games; two pieces of promo/ad copy, one of which details the core game library, the other advertising the Shooting Gallery accessory (the first light gun for a home console).

A simple, unassuming white-and-black plastic box also featuring that ever-stylish 1970s wood-paneling texture in a few places, the original commercially-available Odyssey was a wondrous machine to the consumers of 1972’s America. While to modern eyes it may look more like something you’d see controlling a kitchen appliance or a sewing machine, this was a fully-functional electronic device! The Odyssey could be powered by an AC adapter or six C-cell batteries, at the owner’s option. It connected to one’s television by way of a switchbox, presenting itself to the TV as a channel. The arcane device bore with it two similarly-garbed controllers, each of these being slightly bigger than a Band-Aid box and bearing one button and three knobs. The button was used to reset certain display elements during play, while the knobs were used to control the movement of said elements.

Looking to the modern eye more like some baroque alchemical device than a gamepad, the Odyssey’s controller was a refrigerator-white and wood paneled panoply of dials within dials, its clunky shape meant to be rested on a coffee table or other flat surface during play. I would imagine it was quite heavy, and the imagination can easily conjure up a picture of one being used to bludgeon a sibling to devastating effect. Oh, the horror of the dark past.

These “elements,” before screen-mounted visual overlays and the users’ imaginations were applied, consisted of one large square of white and two smaller squares of white on a black background. That was literally the cast & props of every Odyssey game. These games were simply sets of parameters and behaviors, fed into the system’s motherboard by one or more printed circuit boards; All 28 games playable on the console were generated from a final set (as of 1973) consisting of 12 cards. The most complex game was Invasion, which require cards 4, 5, and 6 to play. The games came with the aforementioned color overlays, to be placed over the screen of the TV as both a visual aid and a sort of “game board.” You see, the system itself didn’t even adjudicate the games’ outcomes or scores; players had to to that themselves, too. As a matter of fact, the console and some games came packaged with “accessories,” such as playing cards and paper money, to further facilitate the actual playing of a structured game. In essence, this ancestor of the modern home video game console was little more than a tool… or perhaps more aptly, one of a set of tools, used to play games. Perhaps most age-indicative of the Odyssey’s traits was the now-obvious total lack of audio capability. There was no sound output whatsoever, presenting a 21st-century observer with a heavy and eerie silence as the Odyssey does its work.

This is what the Odyssey’s guts look like. I hope you didn’t just eat; this is gruesome. Imagine paying $100 for this. It’s almost as silly as what they charge for a PS4 now. Things change and stay the same. Only separate notes in an eternal and violent song.

Magnavox began retail sale of the Odyssey system in September of 1972, setting the MSRP at US $99.99 (or just $50.00 when bought with a Magnavox television set). During its inception, Ralph Baer had estimated an optimistic $20 price point for the console, but the addition of extra elements and the usual corporate desire for profit drove the price higher, something Baer is known to have seen as upsetting. While reports from various sources conflict with one another on the exact number of units produced that first year, it is known that somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 were made. Similar conflicts exist regarding the units sold that year, with the sum ranging from 69,000 to 100,000. While the sales were low overall due to a fairly high price for the Odyssey (in 2017 dollars, the cost translates to almost $600) and a misleading notion that the system only worked with Magnavox TVs, there was enough continuing demand for production to continue through 1973’s holiday season as well. This coincided with a late 1973 ad campaign, resulting in an estimated sale of 125-150,000 units through ’74.

Lawsuits were rampant during this period, as copycats and lookalikes were spawned by various other electronics companies trying to duplicate or cash in on the phenomenon’s buzz. Most Notably, a 1974 suit by Magnavox against Atari, Bally Midway, and other major amusement companies over both the game design and the programming methods used to create them, constituted the emerging VG industry’s first major lawsuit due to copyright infringement. Similar court cases erupted in rapid staccato throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including defendants like Nintendo, Coleco, and Mattel. These court cases not only established the backbone of civil law regarding video games as a commodity, but also made Magnavox and Baer a lot of money (in the hundreds of millions).

Ralph Baer was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2006, and his groundbreaking console is represented in both the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where the Odyssey is part of a permanent installation) and the Smithsonian (where Baer’s prototypes are kept in the American History part of the institute). In 2014, Baer died at age 92, having given birth to a new age of electronics and home entertainment through his innovative work in the development and commercialization of home video games.

Ralph Baer with President George W Bush (right, seen apparently trying to Judo-throw Baer while looking at a something out of frame) in 2006, as Baer was awarded his National Medal of Technology in Washington, DC. 

When it was eventually discontinued in 1975, conservative estimates place worldwide sales of the Magnavox Odyssey at about 350,000 units. While significant, this net result was not considered a smashing financial success. The “Odyssey” brand would continue through the 1970s with successive dedicated consoles (playing only built-in games) and eventually the iconic Odyssey2 in 1978. It is from this point onward that the “early history” of the video game console ends and the commercial video game industry truly begins.

Close up of the Brown Box prototype. Good thing they dialed it back with the wood paneling. We’re talking unsafe levels of style. 

Once again, thank you for reading… and NRW Gaming wishes you a Happy 2018, and so do I. I look forward to continuing our walk together through the future, as we keep the past alive. Stay Retro!

Everything worthwhile starts with an idea… a dream. May yours come true in 2018, RetroFans!

As loyal readers may remember from previous articles (namely the Console Graveyard series and the Hudson Soft article), I have a wistful side to my nostalgia and sometimes seek to honor the entities from VG history that have come and gone. Many left only faint ripples in the fabric of our hobby, but some were veritable giants; it can seem surprising that they are gone and not simply sleeping, dreaming of wonders to show us in the future.

The original idea-farm that brought us River City Ransom and Double Dragon… you’d think they were still running strong, right? You’d think, “anyone who made games like that back then has surely found a foothold in modern gaming.” Sadly, you’d be wrong… but like Hudson and other brands that met similar fates, the worlds they crafted are still alive and vibrant.

Not unlike so many of its contemporaries in Japan at the dawn of the 1980s, Technos began out of a humble one-room apartment in 1981. Founded by N. Tomiyama and two other staff members of the already-established Data East, Technos released their first title in 1982, titled Minky Monkey, but also weathered a lawsuit from Data East claiming they had taken data from one of the company’s games in order to produce bootlegs. I was unable to find out details of how this case was settled, but it’s evident that the two companies made up and shook hands, because Data East published two Technos arcade games – the early hits Tag Team Wrestling and Karate Champ. In the beginning, Technos primarily used other companies for publishing and distribution; they simply lacked the capital to make this happen on their own until later.

They made plenty of stuff for a primarily domestic market in the 1980s. This charming booger monster is from Bogey Manor (1985), a sort of puzzle-action platformer where you smash orbs in a haunted house, apparently to un-haunt it. Here’s a YouTube video.

Technos’s next notable release came in 1986, and while it is perhaps less of a household name than Double Dragon, most of us with a passion for retro gaming will know it well. The original title is Nekketsu Koha Kunio-Kun, but it was released for arcades and the NES in the West as Renegade. Now, let’s talk about that name. Keep an eye out for the words “Nekketsu” (which translates closely enough as “hot-blooded”) and “Kunio” (a name). You’ll hear them later, because Kunio is a recurring character – but us Yanks and Europeans will know him by a Westernized name. Renegade was a recognized hit for the console market, and paved the way for the jewel in Technos’s crown…

A comparison between the domestic Japanese (top) and Western (bottom) versions of Renegade for arcades.

Double Dragon was released thirty years ago, in 1987 (’88 in North America) and became the go-to standard example of the beat ’em up format for long afterward. It spawned a trilogy as an arcade title and a long franchise dynasty as a console game. Double Dragon also helped solidify Technos’s foothold in the West due to its rampant popularity; as the eighties gave way to the nineties, there was even a live action film and a cartoon series based on the franchise.

It wasn’t long after the release of Double Dragon that Technos formed an American branch in California. American Technos Inc. served primarily as part of something the main company had lacked earlier on: a means of publishing and distribution for its games in the West. At first, the firm partnered with Tradewest for many titles, but eventually operated more independently… until it closed down along with the main entity in the late 90s.

Some rather bizarre art for the 7800 port of Double Dragon… The Lee brothers are represented as sullen, thick-skulled man-apes, seemingly indifferent to the suffering and indignation of Marian in the background. Hell, that may not even be Marian, and those may not even be Billy and Jimmy. Maybe this is just what awaits you in the Italian shock-cinema flavor of Technos’s arcade classic. I shudder to think.

Meanwhile, Kunio-kun made the leap over the Pacific as well… and adopted a Western name, Alex. Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, which US players will know as River City Ransom and Europeans will know as Street Gangs, made a lesser impact than Double Dragon but still did very well as a console title. Other chroniclers of retro VG throw around the term “cult classic,” but I don’t see it that way; River City Ransom was fairly common in most NES libraries (despite its initial lukewarm reception in the West) and was far from unknown. It remains perhaps my favorite title from Technos, standing out in my mind for its then-novel combination of ball-busting beat em up mayhem and loose RPG elements. River City Ransom certainly aged well, building in popularity over time and seeing re-releases in astounding frequency. In fact, systems as recent as the GBA have released updated versions, and the original is available on the Wii and 3DS.

What most of us think of when we remember RCR, and rightly so.

Sequels and continuations of Kunio-kun’s exploits continued to do well back home in Japan, and Technos made modest impacts with SNES sequels to their popular franchises in the early 90s, but the unfortunate truth is that by 1996 Technos was closing its doors. Like Hudson Soft, this was not a sudden plummet or a shameful collapse; it was a quiet and somewhat dignified end for a company that had enjoyed success worth being proud of but had also seen the writing on the wall.

After its closure, Technos’s intellectual properties were acquired by a holding company called Million, who held onto these lauded names until 2015. It was this company that produced/licensed the Game Boy Advance titles bearing the names of classic Technos properties like Double Dragon and River City Ransom and the re-releases of originals for Wii’s Virtual Console. In 2015, Million sold the whole bundle to Arc System Works, who retain them to this day.

Nothing brutal, no scissor-and-stitch work. Just a gentle addition to the space beneath the brand-name. Respectful enough, I suppose.

While not everyone who has put hand to joystick will know Technos by name, gamers with a passion for the history of the art form will tell you: Technos is worth remembering, not only for the fantastic work they put out, but as an example of how stars rose and fell in that golden cutthroat era of the 1980s-1990s, when the soil was fertile and the blood was hot.

Stay tough, Kunio-kun.

I don’t even need to say it, but I will… Halloween is on the horizon. Creepy is the current flavor. You can even sort of smell the spooky in the air. Or is that hot wiring and burning plastic? It’s a magical time of year, and not just for adults who like to get drunk in costumes; this is a perfect time to explore the most precarious and mercurial of video gaming’s genres… horror.

There’s a spotty but colorful history inside the history… a scattering of games many of us have never seen or may only have read snippets about on some niche site. Games that never went past domestic in their home country, or were considered too strong in tone for Westerners (that’s a good one…). In any case, I’ve collected a small selection of horror games that may be new to some, but definitely play an often-overlooked role in the history of the hobby.

In ’81, a Taito contract worker named Akira Takiguchi wrote a program for the PET 2001 called Nostromo. As you may guess by the title, the game was strongly inspired by 1979’s Alien. The player must attempt to escape from a spacecraft that has been invaded by an alien monster… that’s completely undetectable unless it is directly in front of you. You must somehow avoid this alien even seeing you, AND rely on limited resources. In fact, in certain scenarios, you won’t have what you need to escape, and have no choice but to simply wait to be eaten. The program was ported to the PC-6001, and in fact the only image related to the game that I could find is that version’s box art. Sadly, I also could not find anything close to an English translation or a modern port.

This is it. This is the box art. Not even too creepy, until you think about it. Think about it materializing in front of you just as you’re reaching an airlock door, and think about what kind of horrible fucking mouthparts it must be hiding beneath those Arthur C Clarke fiber optic dreads.

Another endeavoring horror game that never made it west was Shiryou Sensen: War of the Dead. Produced by Fun Factory in 1987, this game combines horror, RPG, and side-scrolling action elements. Shiryou Sensen features random encounters not unlike how Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest functions; these battles, however, are waged from a side-scrolling perspective similar to that of Zelda II. The management of limited resources (namely ammo) makes the game all the more tense as you attempt to rescue survivors in a town infested by demonic monsters. Released for the MSX, NEC PC-8801, and PC Engine, Shiryou Sensen became part of a successful trilogy – but never left Japan.

Much to my amusement, I also discovered that the 1981 film Evil Dead got the old pixel treatment for the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum in ’85. The overall effect can best be described as “laughable,” and it seems that both contemporary and modern critics elsewhere agree with me. It astounds me that there was any demand for this game four years after the film’s release… but hey, there really is no accounting for taste. One quick browse through prime time TV proves that.

1986 brought us Castlevania, while Splatterhouse came along (actual controversy and all) two years later. Plenty of people were impressed by the latter’s gore and monsters… but you ain’t played shit ’til you’ve gotten your hands on an English translation of 1989’s Sweet Home for the Famicom/NES. It’s hard to accept that Capcom, who produced the cute and friendly Megaman, could have a hand in something so gruesome. In this RPG (created by future Resident Evil maestro Tokuro Fujiwara), your team must try to unravel the mystery of a cursed house through puzzles and fifty-year-old diary entries… all while battling horrible monsters and risking permanent death. Unlike so many RPGs, there are no Phoenix Downs or shrines in Sweet Home… only monsters, melting, and unremitting horror. I’ve swiped a few gifs, since mere stills do this game no honor…

And I could go on from there, but I think we’ve seen enough. These are a few of the games that wait for us, lurking in forgotten corners dark and deep. We will, I hope, fall prey to countless more.

ＨＡＰＰＹ ＨＡＬＬＯＷＥＥＮ

ＰＬＡＹ ＲＥＴＲＯ － ＳＴＡＹ ＲＥＴＲＯ

When we were kids, and we first beheld the wonder of console video games, the entire thing would sometimes seem like one huge river – no, an ocean is more appropriate. One deluge of games would be released, then another, and we’d still be tackling the first. Then here, a whole new system, and there, crazy new peripherals we never even knew we wanted (but we wanted them). It was like we could never run out of choices. The best (but perhaps most bewildering) part: we were duplicating a primary cycle that was approximately 3 years ahead of us in Japan, where all (most) of this stuff was getting made. One thing most of us were guilty of, though, at least until we were older, was that we’d make strong mental associations with the games and characters, but maybe not the great companies creating them. Now, as a grown-ass man writing about video games three times a month, I try to explore what I clearly missed as a child… the mostly unsung sagas of these companies, some of whom came from humble beginnings and seemingly faded away without the public noticing.

Hudson Soft is a tale that begins with Hiroshi and Yuji Kudo. In May of 1973, they opened a simple shop called CQ Hudson, which sold radio equipment and also had some nice art photographs. You know, stop in for a transistor, get a nice shot of the ocean for your mom as a gift. It’s worth noting that the company was named after a train, specifically the Japanese C62 which had been produced originally by Hudson Locomotives. Japan saw a lot of railway growth after the Second World War, which was when the Kudo boys were coming up.

The post-war choo choo that inspired two young Japanese boys to innovate and entertain.

Things went well for the Kudo brothers, and in 1975, they began selling products for personal computers. Around ’78, Hudson began inching into video games. At first, the firm was putting out around 25-30 titles a month, which sounds impossible; given the simplicity of the platforms in that era, however, it was far from it. Needless to say, this clone-vat approach bore only modest fruit, so Hudson leaped at the opportunity when given a shot a developing for Nintendo’s new Family Computer. Let me re-phrase that: Hudson strode confidently into video game history by becoming Nintendo’s FIRST third-party developer. They immediately met with strong success; both their port of Lode Runner and their self-conceived game Bomberman sold over 1 million copies. Bomberman had been released previously for Microsoft’s Japan-geared MSX computer, and Broderbund had done well with Lode Runner in the US and Europe, but the Famicom was the desired platform and the timing was just right.

Two titles that solidified Hudson Soft’s position in the top tier.

From its new office in Midtown Tower in Tokyo, Hudson continued to carve a place for itself in video game history. Starting in 1985, the company began doing something we wouldn’t even think of until the early 1990s: tournament-style video game competitions. Their first one revolved around the Hudson title Star Force in Summer of ’85; its sequel Star Soldier was used in ’86 and even had 2 and 5 minute modes built into its home version to reflect its status as a competitive game. These remarkable yearly events, which took a much less competitive tone after 1992, solidified Hudson Soft’s notoriety and popularity at home.

In 1987, Hudson teamed with NEC to create perhaps the greatest dark-horse console of the 20th Century: The PC Engine. Known in the West as the Turbo Grafx 16. I’ve already written a love letter to that console, so I’ll spare you the gushing… but it’s important to remember a few things. With this platform, Hudson Soft beat both Nintendo and Sega at a few things. The PC Engine set the record at the time for the smallest console. It also achieved graphically what the Mega Drive did, except almost three years earlier. Lastly, the portable version of the PC Engine wasn’t using its own pared-down set of games. This wasn’t some wrap-it-up Game Boy shit. It was using the same media as its mother system. It did this five years before Sega could pull off the same thing by producing the Nomad. There’s more to how awesome the PC-Engine is, but you’d be better served by reading my original article.

You’re not losing a whole lot visually, either.  Sorry, I just like rubbing this in because so many Sega partisans tend to studiously overlook it.

Other memorable titles from Hudson Soft (many of which saw multi-platform release) were Starship Hector, the Adventure Island series, Faxanadu, Milon’s Secret Castle, and my two favorites of theirs… Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu and Felix the Cat.

Hudson Soft’s main bank collapsed during a financial crisis around the turn of the millennium, driving the firm to offer itself on the Japanese stock market. To speed up a sad and tedious tale, Konami bought majority stock in Hudson; the two companies had worked amicably with each other since the early 80s and Konami sought to help give lift to the tired bee’s wings. Hudson still self-published until 2011-2012, when Konami bought what was left and absorbed it into itself. The final vestiges of Hudson Soft vanished in 2014, when its website began redirecting to Konami’s. Officially, the Hudson brand still exists, but it is part of Konami Digital Publishing.

The Hudson Bee about to be taken down from over the firm’s original HQ in Sapporo, 2/29/12.

I tell myself sometimes (And I’m sure someone reading this will laugh at me) that I’m helping preserve and curate history when I write articles like this. I know it’s not terribly significant stuff to the world at large, but it is to me… and to any gamer who likes knowing where things started. Thank you, Kudo Brothers. Thank you for starting a radio parts shop in 1973 and naming it after a train.

Thank you for everything.

More in February! Take care until then!

Alternate Title: “Why I’m Glad They Buried E.T. Out In the Desert”

If you asked a ton of people when console gaming really started, they’d reflexively tell you, “When the Nintendo (NES) came out.” While they’d be wrong, they’re less wrong than we’d like to admit. The NES didn’t start console gaming, but what it did do was swoop into Hades on white-feathered wings and pluck it from damnation.

What this article will attempt to do is illustrate a sequence of events that nearly caved in the concept of video games forever in North America. It’s a tawdry tale featuring cutthroat economics, desperation, stagnation, and E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Too Much of a Good Thing

In 1982-1983, the Atari 2600 was the done thing in console gaming. Homes across the United States were playing Atari. Some weren’t, but they had something… a ColecoVision, a Commodore 64, a Vectrex, or maybe the Odyssey 2 (which was pretty good for its time). In fact, You could say that there were so many choices, the market was flooded.

Since most of us attended school back when they still taught basic economics, we know that if you flood a market with supply, the demand goes down and so does the price point. Well, there were no less than (and probably more than) twelve (12) consoles on the market by 1983, with more planned for ’84 by many of the same companies.

The Magnavox Odyssey2 (that 2 is supposed to be superscript), a pretty good little game machine, but part of a flooded swamp of a market.

Overabundance can lead to rot and stagnation. Guess what? It did.

Home Computers Muscle In

One of the gaming systems I mentioned up there was the Commodore 64. Now, the C64 wasn’t designed just for gaming. It was meant as a home computer. If you were one of many up-and-coming go-getters in the 1980s, you could use this thing to write business reports, organize your finances, send a letter to your mom, or even play a game.

And you could buy all this functionality for about $499, plus a modest investment in some software.

Out Run for the C64. The graphics alone blow the Atari 2600 out of the water. Not to mention that you can use this very same machine to do your taxes or write the great American novel.

Since the first gaming consoles did very little (if any) third-party licensing to start with, the independents of the day would often work with computer platforms. This led to many of them having more diverse game libraries than some consoles did. You know what else these rogue programmers loved about working with platforms like the C64? The graphics capability was miles above anything in console gaming, not to mention overall processing capability.

So why buy a system you can only play games on, that no one else is allowed to write programs for, and doesn’t want to anyway?

Inflation Craps All Over the Dollar

Signs of inflation had started not long after the Bicentennial, with the value of a dollar slowly dropping. While it can be said that the economy improved in some areas in the early 80s, Many amusement and arcade interests lobbied for a smaller dollar coin in 1979 since the spending power of a quarter was a joke by this point. The end result was the Susan B Anthony coin, worth $1 but around the size of a quarter (and thus more manageable for things like vending machines or arcade cabinets). It was this very similarity to the US quarter that made it a flop; some machines would reject the coin, others would simply treat it as a quarter. Neither result was desirable for arcade owners. This hurt video gaming in the States along with everything else happening.

Even Susan looks pissed. “HOW COULD YOU SCREW THIS UP?” Despite failing to solve any of the problems it was meant to solve, the coin was minted again in 1999, when those problems were long gone for various reasons.

Activision Leads the Way to Freedom

We’re going to take a detour for a moment, into the history of Activision. You know that company now as one of the biggest media companies, let alone video game companies, in the world. It’s a well-known name. Activision has its roots in the time period we’re exploring; in 1979, it was founded by programmers who’d left Atari over a lack of credit given – a lack of true meritocracy. You see, programmers of Atari games were never credited, as there WERE no credits in those games. To boot, there was no kickback if a game you developed sold well. You got no cut, just a (rather modest) salary. Activision was the first third-party development firm in video game history, and it DID credit its developers. Atari attempted to sue and do all kinds of other things to block sales, but eventually even they had to eat humble pie and knuckle to the third party wave. Mattel, maker of the Intellivision, stubbornly held out… and never did much in video gaming after the Intellivision.

When Activision made games like Pitfall, Atari pretty much had to bend over and take it. Activision rubbed Atari’s face in it to the tune of 4 million copies worldwide.

My point here is that, because of how they ran their ships, these captains had regular, quiet mutinies as Activision and other new developers soaked up their talent and directed it elsewhere.

E.T. Phones it In / The Mass Grave in Alamogordo

E.T. The Extraterrestrial is frequently cited as the absolute worst game ever created for a console. It was developed in five and a half weeks, left approximately 3 million copies unsold, and was universally panned by video game critics of the era (as well as modern ones who’ve bravely re-examined it). At the exact moment Atari filled trucks with the E.T. Game cartridge, slapped the backs of them, and shut the gate, they had officially shit the bed with the lights on. They just didn’t know it yet. 

The game was so bad that Atari found itself woefully below their bottom line, with three and a half million unsold cartridges out of four million produced. Not only was Atari in serious financial trouble, but flubbing a sure-ticket licensed game like E.T. Made them look like a draft horse with a shattered leg; anyone they did business with was now considering putting them down out of sheer mercy. Atari also had, well, a metric shit-ton of cartridges to offload somehow. They also had no help doing this; Warner Communications had sold them off. Mommy wasn’t around to clean this mess up.

Alamogordo is a very pretty little town in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. The scenic Sacramento Mountains border the town to its west, and to its east can be found the White Sands National Monument. Its features include a nearby Air Force base, an amazing zoo, and the corpses of some 700,000 Atari cartridges.

The overwhelming majority are copies of E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Both he and Elliot look suitably sad. Even remorseful.

Throughout September of 1983, Atari dumped approximately 700,000 cartridges into the dump on the town’s south side. On the 29th of that year, to counter scavenging that had been taking place despite an ordinance banning such, the dump poured a layer of concrete over the buried and crushed games.

They were trying really hard to bury the industry’s biggest turd. But that’s not how the world works. A 2014 documentary, Atari: Game Over, shows the excavation of the long-buried games.

The Aftermath and Epilogue

1983 through 1985 were hard times for video gaming in the US, but the market in Japan was still a fertile ground for ideas. Looking west, companies like Nintendo and Sega had seen what too much “MORE” and not enough “NEW” could do. When Nintendo released the American-market version of their popular Famicom system, the NES… they went gently at first. When soft-launches in NYC and other major markets looked good, the NES (and its contemporaries) waded across the sea to change American gaming forever.

Oh, mighty Saviour!

An era was over, and an era had begun.