The year: 1983. The place: a random, isolated piece of New Mexico desert. The crime: dumping dozens of never played cartridges of extremely terrible video games made by a crashing and burning game company.
Alas, Atari almost got away with it—but were caught thirty years after the fact through the meddlesome digging of so-called video game archaeologists, which is apparently a thing now.
The dig, which lasted for one day before local authority ordered it refilled, uncovered a large amount of original Atari 2600, mostly still in their original packaging. Above you is an image of the 30-year dump site, which most notably housed several copies of ET: The Extra Terrestrial. Atari made millions of copies of that particular game back when they were the undisputed ruler of the video game world back in the eighties, but only sold a few because ET is reportedly one of the worst things ever made in the whole of video game history. As stated by video game archaeologists, Atari poured money and resources into it, something that definitely contributed to Atari’s demise.
Apparently, rumors of these mysterious disappearing truckloads of Atari games have been around since the company’s decline, but there wasn’t a shred of evidence that Atari actually dumped their unsold games in a Alamogordo landfill until now. The discovery of said evidence is apparently such a big deal it warrants the making of a documentary film—one that will premiere on Xbox Live, something I personally find somewhat amusing, because I am a bad person.
“For a lot of people, it's something that they've wondered about and it's been rumored and talked about for 30 years, and they just want an answer,” said Zak Penn, the director of the documentary about the dump site and its history.
Source BBC
Advertisement
