AVGN Just Sparked a Market for an Obscure PS1 Game

If you’ve got nothing better to do, click over to your favorite video game’s wiki and find a page dedicated to easter eggs. No matter how well you know it, there’s bound to be a few that you hadn’t seen yet, and it can be a lot of fun to see what developers have hidden for players. Some of these go undiscovered for years, even decades after release.

On Thursday, AVGN uploaded a video that showcased a very weird, very funny easter egg in the game “E.T. Interplanetary Mission”. Most of the video is just ragging on the game and the abysmal trend of low effort movie tie-in cashgrabs.

But he also showcased a notorious easter egg from the game. If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s a TL;DR: By entering a cheat code and viewing the in-game credits, players would come across a screen depicting E.T. with the text “FUCK OFF BIN LADEN” splashed overhead. You can skip to the ~12:30 mark in the video to see it yourself.

This is extremely jarring today, but the game was published in 2002. You can probably understand – if not agree with – why the developers included the screen. It’s still bizarre, especially when you consider “Interplanetary Mission” is very much a kid’s game. The ESRB gave it an E rating after release, and they’ve (shockingly) never bothered to change it.

We can’t be too surprised, because it seems like this easter egg went entirely unnoticed for decades. As far as we can tell, it was only discovered a few months ago by Bo Bayles on the Rings of Saturn Substack. In the article, he details the reverse-engineering done to unearth the screen alongside a few other cheats.

This discovery got a bit of attention from gaming outlets, but it seems like it went mostly unrecognized. AVGN’s video (which has over 420,000 views as of this publication) is the most attention the easter egg has gotten since it was first discovered, which makes it even more disappointing that AVGN did not reference or credit Bo Bayles despite clearly taking inspiration from his work.

Anyways, back to the game. AVGN goes on to pan and then theatrically destroy his game disc, which tracks with the decidedly mediocre reviews the game picked up after its 2002 release. We’re just speculating here, but “E.T. Interplanetary Mission” probably didn’t sell a lot of copies.

And (this is still a guess) collectors probably weren’t too careful to safeguard the copies that did make it to market. Before this week, just a handful were listed on eBay and even fewer were actually selling.

Well, in the last 72 hours, things have changed. AVGN’s video has kickstarted a surge in interest for the title, with around thirty new sales coming in since Thursday. Most of these are for pretty modest prices, about $10 to $30 at most.

But supply is very low. As of this publication, there are no current eBay listings for the game in “New” condition, and many of the CDs on offer are missing manuals or have scuffed, ripped, or cracked packaging.

It does seem like some people might be conflating this with Atari’s 1982 ET game, which had such notoriously poor sales that Atari elected to bury hundreds of thousands of cartridges in the New Mexico desert. So there are probably more copies floating around than you might first think.

Is this an actionable opportunity? Sort of. If you’ve got hoards of 2000s video games in your attic, it might be worth the effort to dig through them for this game. It was produced for both PS1 and Windows, but it’s believed the easter egg is only present on PlayStation discs.

The market is still pretty slow but it’s possible that AVGN’s video will continue to push sales. If supply dries up faster than demand can be satisfied, we might be watching the birth of another ultra-collectible cult classic video game like Yo! Noid or Pepsi Invaders.

And that’s pretty much it for now. Like we said, we like to chill a little on Saturdays. If you’re looking for more hard-hitting resell-adjacent journalism, you’re on the right website. Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter for updates on the latest flips and popular products before they sell out.