Because I have too many tabs open about this stupid thing, and I want to close them all.

ET: The Videogame.  Yes, it was bad, but it wasn't unplayable.  You skip to mode three or whichever, which turns off the FBI and scientist, and it's perfectly fine.  I kind of wish this upgrade had been in the original version, as it adds a scientist only mode.  The scientist was annoying, because he pulled you back to the city screen, but he didn't steal your parts like that FBI dick did.

Anyway, someone finally went looking for the dump from 1983, and found it, and as the stories claimed, it was full of ET cartridges.  This article is a bit better, as it has nicer pictures, as well as a link to this old NYTimes story.

The important context is that the video game market crashed, largely due to stupid actions.  The most obvious stupid action is mentioned in the second paragraph of the Pac-Man article on wikipedia: "Atari produced 12 million units (which was more than the number of Atari 2600 consoles sold at the time), anticipating a high number of sales."  Think about that for a moment.  They thought this game would be so popular, everyone who owned the console would buy it.  At the time, you could play 2600 games on the Intellivision and Colecovision, but I'm pretty sure even adding that in wouldn't have helped.  So were they expecting people to buy the game to play on someone else's console, who probably also already had the game?

Anyway, the best thing in that Kotaku article was the catalog sticking out of the one box.  Even though the graphics in the games weren't very detailed, they made up for that with the box art, which was always really cool.  Looking at those catalogs was often more fun than actually playing the games.