The Alamogodro, New Mexico city council has approved an excavation permit that will allow a Canadian Film Company, Fuel Industries, to dig up the infamous Atari burial site, supposedly for a documentary.
The Atari burial site is a landfill where millions of Atari cartridges, consoles, and accessories were crushed, encased in concrete, and buried. The majority of these cartridges are rumoured to be copies of E.T., one of the wosrt games ever made.
The story of E.T. is fairly well known among gamers. Atari paid tens of millions of dollars for the rights to make the game following the commercial success of the film. After acquiring the rights at the end of July 1982, Atari decided that they wanted to make the game for the holiday season of the same year. This meant that the game design would have to be completed by September 1, 1982 to allow for production. Atari then proceeded to hurriedly scrap together a horribly repetitive game that no one knew how to play. On top of that, they skipped audience testing due to a lack of time.
Despite negative reviews, the game was still one of the biggest sellers during the 1982 holiday season. It ended up selling 1.5 million copies, making it one of the best Atari 2600 sellers ever. But that still left about 3.5 million cartridges unsold. Despite earning $25 million in sales Atari still ended up with a net loss of about $100 million. E.T. was probably one of the biggest factors of the video game crash of 1983 and Atari’s subsequent bankruptcy.
After that Atari had about 3.5 million E.T. cartridges sitting in the El Paso, Texas warehouse collecting dust. Also in that warehouse were about 5 million unsold copies of Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the best selling Atari 2600 game ever and sold 7 million copies in 1982, yet Atari still had 5 million copies excess. Atari, it seemed, really liked producing way more copies of games than they needed to.
Atari finally decided to write off all the junk collecting in their warehouse and between 10 and 20 tractor-trailers full Atari gear was moved from the warehouse to the landfill. Although Atari never confirmed that the E.T. and Pac-Man cartridges were part of the equipment that was dumped, the timing and scale of the burial it has led many to speculate that they were indeed the main cause.
The Alamogodro council weren’t happy though. They protested the dumping and ended up passing a law that prevented such dumpings from occurring in the future. The council was afraid that the city would become the go-to place for reject products.
Ironically the city is now embracing the landfill and subsequent excavation. They hope that the publicity from the documentary will create awareness about the city and boost the economy.
The excavation will take place in the next 6 months which will mark the 30th anniversary of the dumping that occurred on September 26, 1983. Then we will know for sure whether or not the landfill is filled with millions of copies of horrible games, or if it really is just outdated and broken equipment that Atari had to get rid of.
Leave a Reply