You'll note that Atari were also relying on the sales of games to help pay for the hardware
I've heard about that ET burial for years from various sources (including a couple of very reputable ones), but the video is great
Another example of jumping the gun with games would be the Maxwell family/Atari and Tetris, the BBC or C4 had a great show on it a while back, basically there were 3 or 4 companies interested in getting the licence, and Atari/Maxsoft (or whatever it was called) jumped the gun on getting it onto the market.