Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.
"There's a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché: that scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing they do after constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it."
This sounds horribly wrong to me. Isn't it the "myth" that the scientific community is self-correcting, not individuals?