Atari actually buried the games — the day the desert got patch notes
For decades, the greatest 80s nerd myth wasn’t Bigfoot—it was a dump truck. The story: after the 1983 video-game market faceplant, Atari secretly buried truckloads of unsold cartridges (especially E.T.) in a New Mexico landfill. Your cousin swore it happened; your dad said, “touch grass.” In 2014, a crew rolled in with permits and backhoes and proved the rumor had pixels.
How we got to a midnight burial
- Market glut: too many consoles, too many mediocre ports, too many “me-too” carts in toy aisles.
- Holiday deadlines from hell: E.T. was developed at ludicrous speed. Kids tore off the wrapping, pressed start, and learned what despair feels like.
- Warehouses full of nope: when returns piled up, a landfill in Alamogordo became the corporate confessional.
The 2014 dig (a.k.a. nerd Coachella)
- Documentary crew + city permits: cameras, hard hats, and a crowd of spectators who brought childhood trauma and sunscreen.
- What turned up: not just E.T.—a mishmash of Atari titles, manuals, packaging, plastic shame. Roughly 1,300 items were recovered, cataloged, and some auctioned to fund the local museum.
- Collectors’ weird flex: “landfill-fresh” cartridges—graded, slabbed, displayed like dinosaur mosquitoes in amber.
Why it still matters
- Myth → evidence: proves that sometimes your childhood rumor mill gets it right.
- Parable with a joystick: hype over craft will bury you (literally); deadlines don’t care about gameplay.
- Retro renaissance fuel: the dig rekindled interest in preservation, prototypes, and how we archive play.
Deep-cut extras for show-offs
- The other culprits: the notorious Pac-Man 2600 port and a flood of copycat carts helped crash the market.
- Doc to watch: if you like closure with your catharsis, find the 2014 documentary that follows the excavation and the human circus around it.
- The museum angle: a chunk of the recovered stash went to public collections, which is just classy archaeology for “we saved your broken childhood.”
Verdict
Atari didn’t just crash—they left fossils. And yes, someone somewhere is polishing a boxed copy of E.T. that smells like New Mexico. God bless the ’80s.
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