Masterfully played, Master Blaster. Too bad getbiggers for the most part aren't true gamers and will completely miss an otherwise hilarious post.
I'm a true gamer, and this game destroyed Atari, and video game consoles in general, until the NES came out in 1985/86. Howard Scott Warshaw, who created Yar's Revenge, one of the best Atari games ever, was given a very limited time to push this ET game out for the Christmas season. And Atari decided to make almost double the amount of this game as Atari 2600's that were in households. They though this game would make everyone run out and buy a system.
Well, the game ET sucked ass, and Atari ended up putting most of the unsold cartiges in a landfill. They also put out more copies of their Pacman port than systems sold as well. And even though that game paled in comparison to the real Pacman, it still sold better than ET. But dumb moves like this helped put them under.
People didn't want to pay full new price for a game, when it might be a fraction of the price in a month or two, because Atari made way too many copies over demand. And consumers were mad at getting burned at buying some terrible games. So even when good games came out, less sold at full price then before. Also, there were too many 3rd party developers puting you too much product, most of it inferior. And I don't think Atari could even regulate who could make games for the 2600 or got a cut out of it, like future console makers would.
So, in 83/84, when Nintendo came to Atari and asked them to allow them to slap the Atari name on their console and sell it in the USA, Atari said they were done with video game consoles, and focusing on their home computer division. So, Nintendo put out their NES on their own, and dominated the market for about 10 years.
But near the end of the Super NES days, Sony came to Nintendo, and wanted to make their next console a cd based system, and be partners with them. Nintendo told them that cd were inferior to cartridges and siad no go. So Sony put out the PS One on their own, and in turn dominated the home console market for the next 10 years, thru 2 generations of machines.
Funny how history repeated itself.