Warner and Atari were so confident that they would have the biggest game of 1982, they ended up paying somewhere in the region of 20-25 million dollars for the license. They then assigned the project to Howard Scott Warshaw, (who programmed Yar's Revenge amongst other games for Atari) and gave him a strict deadline to make the game in time for the 1982 holiday season. That deadline was anywhere between four weeks and a couple of months. Atari felt confident that the game would sell well based off of the name recognition alone. They produced 5 million copies of ET (more games than there were 2600 consoles in homes), and only managed to sell 1-2 million. The leftover unsold inventory is believed to be buried in a New Mexico landfill.