There was an urban legend where Atari had made this game called E.T. in like the ’80s, based on Steven Spielberg’s movie, but it was very bad and no one wanted to buy it, and that was when Atari was very successful for all their other games. Rumor was that Atari decided to take back all the E.T. cartridges in the market and even the ones they didn’t sell, and then they buried it somewhere in the desert in New Mexico. People would go there just to look for the cartridges, but they couldn’t find anything.

But very recently people did find something, and after a long excavation, they uncovered the cartridges!

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Informant frequents Reddit, a very up-to-date “social network”, from where he first heard the rumor of the buried cartridges. This is one of the less common instances in which an urban legend is later revealed to be true. It in a way reflects the question of how urban legends arise—perhaps first with leaked but vague information, later growing due to exaggerations and variations in telling.