E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Atari 2600)
In translating a movie into video game action, maybe something could’ve been made out of

E.T.‘s dirt bike scenes (Atari’s own Paperboy showed biking is fraught

with neighborhood peril), but the game instead tasks you the drudgery of assembling phones and avoiding the

open shallow graves that apparently dot the California landscape. Atari infamously gave a single

programmer six weeks to create this game to meet the Christmas rush; its mass overproduction paved

the way for the 1983 industry crash, giving rise to the persistent legend that

thousands E.T. cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill. (Myth: confirmed.)