Unearthing E.T.: A Legendary Atari Mystery Finally Gets Closure

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Image: Xbox Entertainment Studios

By Christina Warren2014-04-25 18:05:27 -0400

Are millions of E.T. game cartridges for the Atari 2600 really buried in a New Mexico landfill? That question will finally be answered on Saturday, as film and excavation crews gather to dig up one of the greatest video game stories of all time.

The story dates back to 1983, when Atari dumped millions of unsold game cartridges and other Atari hardware in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Legend has it one of the games dumped in the landfill was E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. In fact, it may constitute the majority of the cartridges buried there.

See also: 13 Valuable Lessons From Video Games

That Atari buried millions of unsold video game cartridges in a landfill would be a great story on its own, but what happened — or may have happened — with E.T. takes the story several levels higher.

E.T.: Great Movie, Truly Terrible Video Game

For those who need to brush-up on their video game history, E.T. for the Atari 2600 is widely considered one of the worst video games of all time, and it's often one of the titles associated with the video game crash of 1983.

Reports indicate that Atari spent over $125 million on E.T. for the Atari 2600, including a then-staggering $22 million to license the movie into a game.

For Atari, the game seemed like it would be a sure thing. The E.T. movie was released in June 1982 and was a blockbuster hit. Atari rushed the game into production so it would be in toy stores for Christmas 1982.

Howard Warsaw, the game's developer, says he only had five weeks to build the game — including the design. It shows. The game is virtually unplayable, buggy and doesn't even make sense half the time.

Even if the game had been a success, it's not clear that the company could have ever recouped all of its investment costs. But E.T. was not a hit.

Early sales of the game were solid and the title was a "must-have" Christmas item — at least, for the consumers that could find the game. Strained relationships with Atari and its distributors and retail partners meant that fewer copies of the game were available in time for Christmas.

My sister was one of the "lucky" kids to get E.T. for Christmas 1982. My mother told me she scoured every toy store and computer shop in the Atlanta area until she was able to come across the game. Too bad mom didn't wait. Negative reviews of the game meant retailers lowered the price of the game repeatedly. Eventually, most retailers got fed up and sent back unsold or returned copies to Atari.

Atari produced about 4 million E.T. cartridges, but Atari's then-CEO says 3.5 million copies were sent back as unsold inventory or customer returns.

The failure of E.T. — along with other video game flops such as the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, helped Atari lose over $500 million in 1983.

The Atari landfill

That Atari dumped hardware and unsold game cartridges in a landfill in 1983 is not in dispute.

The Alamogordo Daily News reported that semi-trailer truckloads of Atari gear — including cartridges — were dumped in the Alamogordo landfill in September of that year. Apparently, Atari liked that the Alamogordo landfill didn't allow scavengers and crushed and buried garbage nightly.

The Knight-Ridder news service reported on looting taking place in the landfill, with local kids going into the landfill and coming out with cartridges for games such as E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The New York Times reported about a dumping on Sep. 28, 1983, quoting an Atari representative who said the parts were from a closed Atari plant in El Paso.

Starting on Sep. 29, 1983, a layer of concrete was poured on top of the crushed materials — done in part to protect kids from wading into a dump searching for video games.

Eventually, the city of Alamogordo passed laws that would prevent companies such as Atari from using its landfill as an industrial waste site.

An urban legend or strange-but-true story?

Over the last 30 years, the story of Atari dumping discarded materials into the Alamogordo landfill has taken on a life of its own.

Thanks to news reports that cited the E.T. game — not to mention the game's status as being truly, genuinely terrible — the legend has often been simplified into "Atari buried 3.5 million unsold E.T. cartridges in the desert."

That might sound like a ridiculous idea at first — but think about it — Atari did have millions of unsold game cartridges. What did it do with them all?

The legend gained traction in video game circles and is often used as a parable to explain the video game crash of 1983. E.T. is the perfect illustration of how a high-flying industry can rapidly fall to Earth, thanks to greed, poor planning and nonexistent quality control.

It's also the kind of story that can easily morph and shift based on who is telling the story or in what context. When I first heard the landfill legend in the early 1990s, it wasn't E.T. cartridges that were buried in a landfill, it was unlicensed Tetris cartridges for the NES.

Historically, that makes sense because the long-running Atari v. Nintendo lawsuits over licensing, copyright and lock-out programs, of which the unlicensed Tetris game played a role, were finally settled in 1994.

I first ran across the more "official" version of the legend after I got Internet access at my house in 1996. Let's just say, it put playing E.T. on Atari in a brand-new perspective.

As time has passed, the legend has become the sort of lore that has found its way into other mediums. Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, is centered around the E.T. landfill story. For that film's sake, I hope the results of the excavation aren't at odds with any part of that story.

Digging for the truth

Ultimately, what has helped make the E.T. landfill legend so enduring is the fact that E.T. for Atari is so bad. But bad enough that Atari had to bury 3.5 million unsold copies in the desert?

That's the answer we hope to find out on Saturday. That's because the urban legend is finally getting verified when a crew digs up the Alamogordo landfill.

Fuel Entertainment acquired the exclusive rights to excavate the Alamogordo landfill in Dec. 2013. Fuel Entertainment teamed up Xbox Entertainment Studios to turn to the story into a part of a documentary series. The documentary will be directed by Zak Penn (whose past story credits include The Avengers and X-Men 2).

Tons of media will be on-site as the dig takes place — including Mashable — and we look forward to watching what happens.

To me, this is the perfect type of story — because even if it ends up like Geraldo and Al Capone's vault — it doesn't take anything away from the broader story or legend.

Still, as a lifelong video game fan, I'll admit — I really, really hope to see some E.T. cartridges excavated from beneath the Earth.

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Topics: Apps and Software, atari, Atari 2600, Entertainment, Film, Gaming