Atari Buried a Truck of E.T. Cartridges in the Desert

Howard Scott Warshaw was given five and a half weeks to design and program E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. Steven Spielberg had reportedly suggested a cleaner, simpler concept; Atari's executives wanted a 1982 holiday release tied to the film. Warshaw delivered. The game shipped in December 1982 and is widely cited as among the worst commercial games ever published.

Atari manufactured an estimated 4 million cartridges. It sold roughly 1.5 million. Combined with poor sales of Pac-Man on the 2600 and an oversaturated third-party market, the result helped trigger the North American video-game crash of 1983. Atari posted a $536 million loss that year. Warner Communications spun the company off in 1984.

In September 1983, The Alamogordo Daily News reported that fourteen truckloads of unsold games and hardware had been dumped at the city landfill, then covered in concrete. Atari refused to confirm what was buried. The story took on the texture of an urban legend, retold for thirty years as 'the Atari grave' without anyone proving it.

In April 2014, a film crew with the city's blessing excavated the landfill. They recovered 1,300 game cartridges from the buried trove, identified copies of E.T., Centipede, Asteroids, and others, and confirmed the long-dismissed story. Documents released in the dig estimated about 728,000 cartridges in the original dump. The Smithsonian, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Strong National Museum of Play all acquired excavated copies for their collections.