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Started by Yara Haddad (@yara_h) ·

they actually dug up the E.T. cartridges in the desert

Grew up assuming this was an urban legend. Then in 2014 a documentary crew dug into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and there they were. Not only E.T. though, it was all kinds of unsold Atari stock.

6 sources · 38 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
Did Atari really bury E.T. cartridges in a landfill?
Ended at
Video game crash of 1983

The Trail

  1. “atari et cartridges buried in desert real or myth” (google.com)
  2. Atari video game burial (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game) (en.wikipedia.org)

    programmed in about five and a half weeks so it could be out for christmas 1982

  4. Howard Scott Warshaw (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. Atari: Game Over (en.wikipedia.org)

    the 2014 doc that paid for the dig

  6. Video game crash of 1983 (en.wikipedia.org)

What I came away with

Atari really did dump truckloads of unsold cartridges and hardware in 1983. The 2014 dig confirmed it, but E.T. was only part of the pile, and one bad game didn't cause the crash on its own: a glut of consoles and rushed games did.

Keep going