It is said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. How one can use intentions as a surface material is beyond me, but I do agree with the general principal. Often, a creator will have a great idea, a superior concept, a can’t miss proposition, only to see the end result crash and burn like the Hindenburg. More often than not, it’s the hubris of interested parties that lead the way to ruin. Out of control egos, bloated budgets, marketing blunders, all of these elements can easily conspire to lead a product to the mouth of oblivion.

Hollywood has a long history of box-office bombs. From the huge budget and poor box-office of Cleopatra that nearly doomed an entire studio to ruin, or any number of Kevin Costner train wrecks like The Postman or Waterworld, or even the more recent disaster of Poseidon, bombs are just a part of the business. In retrospect, most bombs seem like they could have been easily avoided, but once the fuse is lit, no one ever seems capable of putting it out. Not to be outdone, the video game industry has its fair share of disasters, though not yet at the alarming regularity of their Hollywood siblings. With that in mind, let us settle into our chairs and take a good look at the classic bombings of our beloved pastime.

E.T. Phone 911

Just as Cleopatra and Elizabeth Taylor’s million dollar salary nearly bankrupted Fox, so to did another Hollywood star bring total financial ruin to Atari. In this case, the star was penis-looking E.T. and the game in question was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, forever cementing the fact that games based on movies, and movies based on games, are doomed to eternal suckage.

Howard Scott Warshaw isn’t a household name, though his early games for the Atari 2600 system were classics, including Yar’s Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Unfortunately, this modest streak of success came to a screeching halt when he was tasked by Atari to develop a game based on the movie E.T. The problem was, Atari only gave Howard six weeks to conceptualize, design, and program the finished product. Amazingly, he accomplished this near-impossible goal, but not with the results Atari was hoping for.

A game based on the smash-hit movie seemed like a no-brainer to make serious bank at retail, so Atari’s parent company, Warner Communications (now Time-Warner), didn’t even blink when it came time to cut a check to Steven Spielberg for $25-million for the exclusive world-wide rights to E.T. That’s not a misprint. $25-million, in 1982 dollars. It had taken so long to secure the rights that Atari now found themselves with limited time to get the game in stores by Christmas. Hence the six week turnaround for poor Howard Scott Warshaw.

The result wasn’t pretty. E.T. was a horrible game with worse graphics, even by Atari 2600 standards of the day. It was a complete mess. It ended up selling about 1.5 million cartridges, leaving them with approximately 2.5 million unsold. Coupled with the expense of marketing, securing the license and vendor returns, as well as other management missteps within the halls of Warner, Atari went on to post an amazing monetary loss of $530-million smackaroos.

In September of 1983, residents of Alamogordo, New Mexico would have seen a strange sight on their roads. A convoy of a dozen or so 18-wheelers were rumbling towards a landfill where they proceeded to dump hundreds of thousands of E.T. cartridges and Atari 2600 consoles, covering the entire mess with a thin layer of concrete. Atari would never again regain their dominance in an industry they created.