The Atari Tomb: Buried Games of the Great Video Game Crash

Beneath thirty feet of compacted trash and concrete at the Alamogordo city landfill, something extraordinary was buried in the fall of nineteen eighty-three: the physical remains of the first great crash of the American video game industry.

Atari had dominated home gaming through the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, building a business worth billions of dollars. Then it overextended. The company had paid twenty-one million dollars for the home rights to Steven Spielberg's film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, then rushed designer Howard Scott Warshaw to build a game from scratch in five weeks, an impossibly compressed schedule. The result was released in time for Christmas nineteen eighty-two. Players found it nearly unplayable, a jumble of logic and mechanics that even devoted Atari fans abandoned in frustration. It is widely remembered as one of the worst video games ever made.

Industry conditions were already deteriorating. Consumer confidence in home gaming had collapsed under a flood of poor-quality software from dozens of competing publishers. Retailers returned unsold inventory by the pallet. Atari's revenue fell from more than two billion dollars in nineteen eighty-two to under half a billion by nineteen eighty-four. The company was in crisis.

Sometime in September nineteen eighty-three, Atari discreetly arranged with the city of Alamogordo to dispose of nearly eight hundred thousand cartridges and consoles from an El Paso warehouse. The games, which included not only E.T. but Centipede, Pac-Man, and dozens of other titles, were dumped into the landfill and covered with concrete. The event became legend almost immediately, but also doubt, with some insisting the whole story was exaggerated or invented.

Thirty years later, in April twenty fourteen, documentary filmmakers arranged an excavation. The city granted two days and four acres of access. Workers dug through the layers and found them: one thousand three hundred eighty-two cartridges, cartridges that had waited underground for three decades. Most were auctioned to raise more than one hundred seven thousand dollars for Alamogordo's library, police department, and local museum. The Centre for Computing History in England acquired a collection for permanent preservation. The Atari Tomb had turned out to be real.