Yes, Atari really did bury copies of E.T. in a New Mexico landfill. A documentary crew dug them up in April 2014, and Kotaku's Jason Schreier opened his report with the line that one of gaming's most infamous urban legends had turned out to be true.
What didn't survive the dig is the version most people had been repeating. E.T. wasn't alone down there, and nobody found the millions of copies that gave the story its scale. It's a rare urban legend that comes out of the ground both confirmed and smaller.
The legend, and how it got so big
The bones of it go like this. Atari rushed out a 2600 game of E.T. to coincide with the 1982 film, and it flopped. The Register's 2013 summary gives the popular telling: Atari made five million cartridges, nearly all came back unsold, and the overstock was crushed by steamrollers and sealed under concrete in the city landfill at Alamogordo.
The odd thing is that it was never entirely a secret. Kotaku notes that The New York Times reported on the dump in 1983, and the ABC cites the same paper's reporting that the games were buried in the desert "in the middle of the night". Even so, decades of retelling left two camps: people who took the millions as fact, and sceptics who doubted it had happened at all. A landfill isn't an easy thing to fact-check from a keyboard.
What the 2014 dig found
In December 2013, Xbox Wire reported, Fuel Entertainment secured excavation rights with help from local garbage contractor Joe Lewandowski, then took the idea to Xbox Entertainment Studios for the documentary that became Atari: Game Over. Lewandowski wasn't a random recruit. He ran a waste company in the 1980s and, according to The Register, claimed to know where in the 100-acre site the burial was.
On April 26, 2014, the crew turned up an Atari 2600 joystick, an E.T. cartridge, a box and a manual. Microsoft's Larry Hryb posted a close-up of what he called the first E.T. cartridge exhumed in 30 years. That settled the main question.
The more interesting result came with the count. Engadget reported in May 2014 that 1,377 cartridges had been recovered, and that only 171 of them were E.T. The rest included Centipede, Missile Command and Asteroids. When Game Developer covered the later eBay sale, its list also had Warlords, Defender, Star Raiders, Swordquest, Phoenix and Super Breakout.
So the famous grave of E.T. turned out to be more like a general clear-out. That fits the rest of the record better than the legend does. The Register's account has Pac-Man cartridges being returned in similar numbers, and Game Developer places the dump in the 1983 North American video game crash. E.T. may be the name on the headstone, but the evidence suggests Atari was getting rid of stock, not one embarrassing game.
What it didn't prove
The dig recovered a sample, not a census. Here are the numbers worth keeping apart:
- Recovered: 1,377 cartridges, Engadget's figure as of May 2014.
- Still buried: Engadget says "over 700,000 games" remain, though it doesn't name a source for that number.
- Made: five million E.T. cartridges is the figure given by The Register and the ABC. That's production, not burial.
None of these reports establishes how many E.T. copies went into that landfill. On the day of the discovery, Kotaku called it unclear whether there were millions or even thousands. A dig this small can't rule the millions out, but it gives nobody grounds to claim them either. If I had to bet, I'd say the old number was always doing more storytelling than accounting.
The dig also says nothing useful about the bigger claim that E.T. brought down Atari. The ABC called it a major factor in the company's collapse, and that link remains an argument, not something the landfill can settle. A hole in the ground can show you what a company threw away. It can't show you why the company failed.
Where the cartridges went
The ending is pleasingly small-town. According to Game Developer, 881 cartridges sold on eBay for a total of $107,930.15, with $65,037.78 going to the city of Alamogordo and $16,259.44 to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society. Another 23 went to museums.
So, did Atari bury E.T.? Yes, along with a good deal else. The legend was right about the hole and shaky on the headline, and the games Atari threw away ended up raising real money for the town that had been storing them all along.
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