Atari really did bury its games in a New Mexico landfill

In September 1983 the Alamogordo Daily News reported that semi-trailers from an Atari warehouse in El Paso, Texas, were unloading at the city landfill. There were somewhere between 10 and 20 truckloads. Boxes, cartridges, consoles and computers were crushed and buried. Atari had picked the site because scavenging was not allowed there and the garbage was crushed and covered every night.

Local kids got in anyway. On September 28 a news service reported that children in the town of 25,000 were robbing "the Atari grave" and coming away with cartridges. The same day The New York Times ran the story, and an Atari representative confirmed it. The goods came from the company's plant in El Paso, which was being closed.

From September 29, workers poured a layer of concrete over the crushed material, which is rare at a dump. An unnamed workman said there were dead animals down there, and nobody wanted children to get hurt digging. A city commissioner complained that Alamogordo did not want to become "an industrial waste dump for El Paso," and the dumping soon stopped.

Accounts of what went into the hole differed. Onlookers named E.T. among the games, and later reports tied the dump to it. E.T. was Atari's game of the Spielberg film, and it had left the company with a huge stock of unsold cartridges. Over the years the story grew. Millions of copies were said to be down there, crushed and sealed in concrete. Since nobody could check, many people came to treat the whole thing as an urban legend. In 2004 the game's programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, said he doubted that millions of copies had ever been destroyed.

In 2013 the city gave a film company permission to dig for a documentary, and on April 26, 2014, the excavation opened to the public. Warshaw was there. So was Armando Ortega, a city official who as a boy had been one of the kids raiding the dump. He said they found dozens of good games and gave the E.T. cartridges away, because the game "sucked." James Heller, the Atari manager who had run the burial, said he was the one who ordered the concrete. He put the number of cartridges buried at 728,000.

A team of archaeologists examined what the excavators brought up. In the first hours they found E.T. cartridges, along with many other games. They recovered about 1,300 cartridges from 59 different titles before the rest proved too deep to reach, and the hole was filled in again.

The city sold most of the finds online, and the money went to public works and a local history museum. The Smithsonian Institution took one of the E.T. cartridges for its collection.