For over three decades, a seemingly ordinary stretch of desertscape outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico, kept one of the video game industry’s longest-lasting myths. One the evening of September 28, 1983, under the cover of darkness, heavy transport trucks dispatched by Atari Inc. dumped loads of unsold video cartridges, crushed console hardware, and internal returns into the local landfill.
For decades, gamers, gaming historians, and internet sleuths debated whether millions of copies of the notoriously bad Atari 2600 title E.T The Extra Terrestrial truly lie buried beneath layers of dirt, or if it was merely an exaggerated footnote to the gaming crash of 1983.
A Hasty Development Process and the Media Landscape
To truly understand the Atari burial, you must remember the immediate history surrounding the incident. The early 1980s represented a boom time for the gaming industry, and corporate executives rushed E.T The Extra Terrestrial to the market with a ridiculously short development timeline of just five weeks.
This was purely done to capitalize on holiday movie tie-in sales. While celebrated programmer Howard Scott Warshaw performed what many consider a miracle just to get playable code at all in that timeframe, the experience left consumers completely baffled and Atari was left with millions of unsold cartridges.
By the mid 1980s, American television screens would often change over from cheesy commercial messages of how fun video games could be to daytime broadcasts filled with reports of large companies’ insolvencies and advertisements for birth injury lawsuit settlements being a testament to the fast rise and fall of this economic bubble.
The 2014 Excavation to Separate Myth From Reality
In 2014, this 30-year-old video game legend was given the opportunity to become reality. On April 26, a video production team, archaeologists, and a crowd of around one hundred retro gamers congregated at this vacant lot within the Alamogordo Landfill.
Digging began 30 feet below an industrial concrete and dirt cap. Led by Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment Studios, who were producing the documentary film ‘Atari: Game Over’, the excavation required the accurate mapping of the landfill and detailed manifest history to properly locate the buried treasure.
Unearthed Treasure of the Desert
Once a mechanical claw reached the 30-foot depth beneath the desert floor, crushed boxes, yellowed instruction manuals, and plastic cartridges were brought to the surface. The first unearthed artifact was an “E.T: The Extra Terrestrial” cartridge that maintained its bright red-and-yellow color below a thick, compacted layer of clay.
With further digging came thousands more game cartridges from titles such as Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, and Yars’ Revenge, in addition to early prototype controls.
Preservation of a Global Cultural Legacy
After the Alamogordo excavation, the way society perceives the preservation of video games and tangible media changed. Instead of being merely trash, each item excavated was cataloged and preserved. The City of Alamogordo retained a significant portion of the discovered items which were sold through online public auctions.
Over $100,000 was raised for a number of Alamogordo civic projects and the New Mexico Museum of Space History, with several more games donated to museums such as the Smithsonian in Washington and the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester where they are on display for future video game enthusiasts to view.
Visiting the Excavation Site
Today, the former site of the dump and historic burial ground in the Chihuahuan Desert is a quiet, unassuming parcel of New Mexico land. It is not an amusement park, nor an attraction with neon lights and themed souvenirs.
What lies beneath the dusty earth represents a rise and fall of the consumer technology boom and continues to hold a place in global popular culture. The Alamogordo landfill dig made the world understand that video games are physical artifacts associated with real-world events and ambitious vision.
