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GET OUTTA TOWN: Video game history slowly decomposes beneath the New Mexican desert » The burial of Atari games in Alamogordo launched an urban legend [ travel]

Courtesy of Jason/flickr » » In 2014, about 1,300 Atari video game cartridges were excavated from a landfill where they were buried in the 1980s. Hundreds of thousands more remain below Alamogordo, New Mexico.

MADE IN DURANGO SINCE 2015 A seemingly vacant lot on the west side of Alamogordo, New Mexico, is the site of a mass extraterrestrial burial. Steven Spielberg’s E.T., to be specific, in the form of thousands of Atari 2600 video games. The site symbolizes a dark time in video game history and for many years was considered an urban legend. Heading into 1982, the video game industry was riding high — Atari Inc. in particular. Its purchase by Warner Communications for $28 million in 1976 led Atari to grow to a net worth of $2 billion. By 1983, Atari’s high ride started to go south.

Atari’s moneymakers tended to fall into two categories: ports — or, in other words, conversions — of popular arcade games, such as Space Invaders, and tie-ins with successful films, such as “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” As such, the company expected its 1982 port of the arcade game Pac-Man to be wildly popular, and in turn manufactured 12 million cartridges, despite having only sold 10 million consoles to play them with. Atari hoped the success of its ported Pac-Man would create consumer demand for an additional 2 million game consoles. Unfortunately, the game sucked. Atari’s port of Pac-Man barely resembled the arcade version and lacked everything charming about the original. Initially, the game was a commercial success and sold 7 million copies, but ultimately the company was stuck with 5 million unsold cartridges along with the ones buyers while demanding refunds.

At the same time, Atari bought rights to license a game based on Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” for an estimated $20-25 million. The company had difficulty with licensing issues, though, leaving the game’s programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, with just weeks to complete the port before holiday sales. The objective of the E.T. game was to allow E.T. to “phone home” and revolved around collecting three pieces of a telephone that were scattered randomly throughout several holes that players searched while evading FBI agents and scientists. The game was incredibly monotonous and is often cited as one of the worst video games ever made. Of the 5 million E.T. game cartridges manufactured, only 1.5 million were sold.

Atari quickly amassed a huge inventory of game cartridges it couldn’t sell. When the entire video game market crashed in 1983 after market saturation and the declining interest in game consoles grew in lieu of personal computers, the company decided to dump all of its unsold inventory. Literally.

Atari downsized in 1983, firing 1,700 members of its staff and moving its manufacturing overseas, and its El Paso, Texas plant and warehouses were emptied and closed. According to an old New York Times story, in September of 1983, the company drove 14 truck Thursday, February 13, 2020 | 9 Continued on Page 23