[Fruit Pie Jones]

I was eight years old when the game came out, and I played ET on my own Atari 2600. I remember enjoying it for a short while before thinking, "So...that's all there is?" Fortunately I had borrowed it from a friend rather than asking my parents to buy it for me, so I lost nothing but a little time, which I had in abundance at the age of eight.

ET didn't single-handedly destroy the video-game industry, of course, but it was an important factor in Atari's demise (at least, the demise of what was Atari at the time) and the Crash of 1983.

As for the buried-in-the-desert story, it's true to a point. Truckloads of Atari cartridges were indeed dumped in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, crushed, and subsequently covered over by concrete. For the most part, these weren't cartridges that were bought by consumers and then angrily sent "straight back to the company," though; they were unsold cartridges that were returned to Atari by distributors when it became apparent that their supply was far greater than demand would ever be. And I'll bet you any amount of money that ET isn't the only title resting in pieces down there.

Rating? From what I remember, I agree with Darth: 2 out of 5.