12 Video Games You Presumed Were Massive Flops (That Really Weren't)

2. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Now we're getting to the complicated ones. E.T. is notoriously regarded as one of the worst video games ever made, what with its dire gameplay and ridiculous difficulty, but it's also believed to be a commercial flop given that it caused the video game crash of 1983, even if the truth is a little more interesting than just that. The game sold an impressive 1.5 million units (this was 1982, remember), making it a big seller for the Atari 2600, but the problem was that Atari severely over-estimated demand for the title, leaving an estimated 3.5 million copies left unsold. The game made $25 million for Atari, though this was completely steamrolled by the fact that Atari's optimistic production and customer returns caused them to lose $100 million, while the legend continues that most of the unsold and returned copies ended up being buried in a New Mexico landfill. Was E.T. a flop? Yes and no. By pure sales statistics, absolutely not, but when you factor in how poorly Atari mis-managed the game's manufacturing process, they ended up hemorrhaging cash because of it...and the fact that the game sucked, of course.