The Atari crash was a lot more multifaceted than that, but E.T. is often credited as one of the biggest factors. Though it was arguably more of a symptom of a lack of quality control as the market was being flooded with rushed titles.
The old story is that the game was so bad that the unsold cartridges were buried in the middle of the New Mexico desert.
Supposedly it’s the origin of the term “shovelware” to describe horrible quantity-over-quality types of games. Often with marketing tie-ins to popular media, to entice unwitting customers into purchasing the horrible games without actually reading up on it first. Modern usage tends to refer to the lazy mobile asset-swapped games, or the “1000 in 1” game packs that are just bad recolors of old games.
ET for the Atari 2600. Yes, I’m old.
Pac-Man might not have looked like the arcade version, but it was close enough, and we played the hell out of it. ET was a confusing snooze.
Wasn’t that the game that killed video games for six years? Or at least was pinned as such by reporters lol
The Atari crash was a lot more multifaceted than that, but E.T. is often credited as one of the biggest factors. Though it was arguably more of a symptom of a lack of quality control as the market was being flooded with rushed titles.
Yes. They buried the unsold cartridges in the desert.
The origin of the term “shovelware” lol almost forgot about that
The old story is that the game was so bad that the unsold cartridges were buried in the middle of the New Mexico desert.
Supposedly it’s the origin of the term “shovelware” to describe horrible quantity-over-quality types of games. Often with marketing tie-ins to popular media, to entice unwitting customers into purchasing the horrible games without actually reading up on it first. Modern usage tends to refer to the lazy mobile asset-swapped games, or the “1000 in 1” game packs that are just bad recolors of old games.