[LINK] "Film Crew Tries to Unearth Atari's 'E.T.' Game Graveyard"

[rfmcdonald]

Mashable's Chelsea Stark is one of the many journalists covering the news that a Canadian film company is planning to excavate a New Mexican landfill where--reputedly--millions of copies of the 1982 Atari 2600 game E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial were buried.

Atari released a video game in 1982 that was such a commercial flop that the company buried the evidence in a New Mexican desert. But, since the past can never remain buried, a film crew now wants to dig up a stash of those ET The Extra-Terrestrial games, in an attempt to uncover gaming history.

According to Albuquerque, N.M., television station KRQE, film production company Fuel Industries has been granted six months of access to the Alamogordo, N.M., landfill where Atari dumped nine semi trucks worth of E.T. game cartridges and other merchandise in 1983.

[. . .]

The E.T. game was considered by many to be the final straw in a series of poorly manufactured games, which contributed to the United States' video game industry crash of 1983. At that time, the market was saturated with low-quality games, created by just about anyone, for the variety of consoles trying to hold market share. That included the Atari 2600, for which E.T. was created.

The game was apparently a five-week rush job meant to catch holiday sales and tie in with the release of the Steven Spielberg classic. That rush is apparent, however, as E.T. was full of weirdly-colored characters and backgrounds, nonsensical gameplay and a host of glitches that made it practically unplayable. After poor reviews by critics and consumers, Atari was left sitting on 3.5 million copies.

PC Magazine's Damon Poeter debunks the myth that the landfill is filled with the game; see also Wikipedia's article.

Marty Goldberg, co-author of Atari Inc.: Business is Fun, thinks the treasure hunt being conducted by Fuel Industries is a "non-issue publicity stunt." In a comment on PCMag's original article about the film company's mission to uncover the legendary E.T. cartridges, Goldberg said he and co-author Curt Vendel debunked the myth of the buried games based on interviews with former Atari employees they conducted and internal company documents they pored over to research their book.

"There were never thousands of E.T. games buried in Alamogordo, that's a myth that sprung up later and was also never once mentioned by the actual press articles of the time. The dump there was simply a clearing out of Atari's Texas manufacturing plant as it transitioned to automated production methods and a focus on personal computer manufacturing. It had previously been one of the main plants for manufacturing of game cartridges and other hardware, and game manufacturing was being moved overseas to China," Goldberg said.

"As part of the transition, the unused cartridge stock of a group of titles (not just E.T.), console parts, and computer parts were all dumped there in New Mexico. It was covered in detail by the Alamogordo press at the time, and is just such a non-mystery that I'm surprised by all this."