Atari’s Legendary New Mexico Dump to be Excavated by Film Company to Make a Documentary

In September 1983, Atari dumped 14 truckloads of game cartridges and other computer equipment at a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico and crushed the discarded merchandise beneath a layer of concrete and dirt. The event has since become the stuff of urban legend, and now Canada-based film production and entertainment company Fuel Industries has been permitted to excavate the site for six months to create a documentary investigating the legend. Many believe the games dumped were extra copies of the notoriously terrible 1982 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, and some speculate that prototypes of the Atari Mindlink video game controller may also be buried in the landfill. According to KRQE, Joe Lewandowski — who ran a garbage company at the time — claims to have seen what was dumped. “It was the game systems, actually the game systems themselves it was actual cartridges and games, ET and so on.”

image via AtariAge

via NPR, JustJon