Legendary Atari Video Game Burial in New Mexico Excavated, ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ Discovered

As part of a documentary being made by Microsoft’s Xbox Entertainment Studios, an old landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico was excavated on April 26th in search of the legendary Atari video game burial of 1983. Former Atari manager James Heller says that the video game company tasked him with disposing of 728,000 cartridges they had stored in an El Paso, Texas warehouse after financial troubles crippled them, and the landfill dump was the result.

Part of the legend of the dump is that the majority of those cartridges buried were believed to be several million of the notoriously bad E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game made by Atari for their Atari 2600 console. Designer Howard Scott Warshaw was given a timeline of five and a half weeks to produce the game in time for the 1982 Christmas season, and it is often cited as one of the worst video games ever created.

Rollin Bishop
Rollin Bishop

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