Just in time for Christmas!

The programmers were given only five weeks to finish coding ET so it would be out "just in time for Christmas."

It's also great how they pimp the Odyssey with "Munchkin" (KC Munchkin, actually), since that earned the system a lawsuit from the makers of Pac-Man.

Atari (and the other companies) made a lot of mistakes that led to the crash. ET just happened to be one of the flashier ones.

My favorite story from this era was how they buried all the unsold Pac-Man and E.T. carts in an undisclosed location in the desert and poured concrete on top of it.

It wasn't an undisclosed location, it was a landfill. They did crush them all with a steamroller before pouring the concrete, to ensure that nobody would try digging them up.

Also, relevant to the E.T. cartridge debacle:

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=907

Actually, in many cases, the price has dropped. I remember my aunt buying several SNES games, such as Chrono Trigger and Primal Rage, for like when I was a kid.

Because he didn't want to be the tardiest anymore.

I actually have a disturbing number of Atari games from that era. At the time I was a very small child and did not actually understand how much money I was making my parents spend on this stuff.

On the plus side, my Atari still works to this very day, since it's internal components can be summed up by "A circuit board and some wires."

Is that taking into account that this is a Canadian commercial?

That stupid Odyssey system would cost you 7.15 Canadian in today's dollars. Also in 1983 the US:Canada exchange rate was 1:1.23.

So that means 1 modern US dollars for those two stupid games. 2 for the fucking Atari. And the Atari doesn't even have vibrating controllers!

Meanwhile, an excessive number of third party software producers flooded the market with tons of sub-standard games. When these startups folded, their stock was sold at markdown. This cut into the sales of other publishers, who naturally folded causing their games to be marked down. Eventually this chain reaction reaches the top of the industry, where the hardware makers were bleeding money from mistake after mistake.

Millions of ET cartridges were produced and sent to stores for the Christmas release - a majority of them were returned by disappointed/angry customers.

Oh, hi, Snopes.

http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

In ET you spend the entire game trying to collect radio parts while you dodge an FBI agent who can appear out of nowhere and steal them all. At the same time you have to avoid falling into pits that are a chore to climb out of. At the very least, it's annoying as shit.

ET wasn't the primary cause of the industry crash, but it certainly contributed to it.