All the way back in 1983, the video game market was in decline.  Too many systems for an average child to count, releasing horrible games and Atari was at the forefront.  Even though Atari was the largest video game company during this era, it was also the cause for its downfall.  Atari released the infamous video game titled “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” in 1982, and is now known as one of the worst games ever made.  The whole North American video game market crashed in 1983 and would stay in that state till Nintendo would almost single handedly revive it in later when the Nintendo Entertainment System made its way to North America in 1985.

Atari was embarrassed by its flop, and wanted to erase its existence.  So to hide their shame, they buried all unsold copies of the E.T. Atari game in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.  This story made its way around for many years, and due to the ridiculous-ness of the story, many believed it to just be an urban legend, until April 26, 2014.  On this day, Fuel Industries, and online interactive and marketing company, and Microsoft worked with the New Mexico government to dig up the landfill as part of a documentary.  On the same day that the excavation started, they found it, over 700,000 unsold cartridges, proving that even if it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t mean it’s not true.