Atari Buried 800,000 Game Cartridges in the New Mexico Desert

By the autumn of 1983 the American video-game business was collapsing. Atari, the dominant console maker, had over-ordered inventory ahead of Christmas 1982 in expectation of demand that never came. The infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial cartridge — designed in five weeks by a single programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, to hit a Christmas tie-in with the Spielberg film — sold a fraction of the 4 million units Atari had pressed. Pac-Man on the 2600 had similar overstock problems. By September Atari's El Paso warehouse was full of merchandise nobody wanted.

Between September 22 and 25, 1983, the company began trucking the surplus south. The destination was a municipal landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico — a sleepy site whose operators had quietly agreed to take an estimated 800,000 cartridges, consoles, and promotional displays. Workers ran the inventory through industrial crushers, buried the pieces, and poured concrete on top. Atari issued no press release. Local children who tried to scavenge from the early loads were chased off.

The story leaked, then turned into one of the great urban legends of gaming. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Atari executives publicly denied that any mass burial had happened. The legend hardened into a piece of folklore people repeated mostly to mock people who repeated it.

In April 2014, a documentary crew got permission to excavate. Joe Lewandowski, the Alamogordo waste hauler who had personally watched the trucks unload thirty years earlier, led them to the right square of dirt. Within hours of breaking the concrete, E.T. cartridges started coming up. The team eventually pulled 1,382 of them, alongside copies of Centipede, Pac-Man, and 56 other Atari titles. They were auctioned off in batches and raised $107,000, which Alamogordo split between its library, museum, zoo, and police department. Recovered cartridges now sit in the Smithsonian and the Henry Ford Museum.