Atari’s game, Extra-Terrestrial, was designed in a record five weeks by a single programmer in 1982. The game was a commercial failure due to its poor quality and difficult gameplay. Atari struggled to recover from the poor sales of E.T. and never recovered its reputation among the gaming community. The game is widely held to be the worst video game of all time. Millions of copies went unsold, and Atari ended up literally burying the game by dumping many 728K surplus cartridges into a New Mexico landfill. Within a year of E.T.’s release, the entire video game industry collapsed.
