Why did Atari bury hundreds of thousands of video games in the desert?

Because it had far more games than anyone wanted to buy. In the early 1980s the American video game business was flooded with consoles and cartridges, many of them bad, just as cheap home computers began luring players away. The result was the video game crash of 1983: home video game revenue fell from around $3.2 billion in 1983 to around $100 million in 1985, a drop of almost 97 percent. Atari, the industry giant, was left with warehouses full of unsold games, and in September 1983 it crushed truckloads of them into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and poured concrete on top.

Two games became symbols of the disaster. Atari made 12 million Pac-Man cartridges for a console it had sold only about 10 million of. Then came E.T., based on Steven Spielberg's film. Licensing delays left its programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, about five weeks to make it, and it is often called one of the worst video games ever. According to Atari's boss, about 3.5 million of the 4 million copies made came back unsold or returned.

For decades the story of a desert full of buried E.T. cartridges was dismissed as an urban legend. Then, in April 2014, a documentary team dug up the landfill and found the games. The real total was smaller than the myth: Atari officials put it at around 700,000 cartridges of various games, not millions of E.T. One local official remembered raiding the dump as a boy and giving his E.T. cartridges away because the game was so bad.