For decades, it was the Loch Ness Monster of the gaming world. A story whispered in smoky arcades and early internet forums about a massive graveyard in the New Mexico desert. People said Atari, buried in shame and debt, sent a fleet of semi-trucks into the dead of night to dump millions of copies of a failed game. It sounded fake. Honestly, it sounded like a convenient metaphor for the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. But the E.T. video game landfill wasn't just some urban legend cooked up by cynical Gen Xers. It was real.
The story starts with a 2014 excavation that finally proved the myth. I remember the footage of that dusty day in Alamogordo. When the backhoe finally hit plastic and crushed cardboard, the collective gasp from the gaming community was audible. They found them. Hundreds of thousands of cartridges, not just E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but also Pac-Man and Atari hardware, all crushed and encased in concrete.
It's a weirdly tragic image. You have this massive corporation that essentially birthed the home console industry, and within years, they’re literally burying their mistakes in a municipal dump.
Why Atari Buried E.T. in the First Place
To understand why a company would drive 800 miles to hide its inventory, you have to understand the sheer hubris of Atari in 1982. They were the kings. They had the Atari 2600, a machine that was basically printing money. When Steven Spielberg’s E.T. became a global phenomenon, Atari CEO Ray Kassar wanted a tie-in. Badly.
The deal was inked late. Like, "we have five weeks to build a game before the Christmas deadline" late. Most games back then took six months to a year to develop. Howard Scott Warshaw, the programmer tasked with the impossible, actually pulled it off. He built a functional game in about five weeks.
But functional isn't the same as good.
The game was notoriously difficult and, frankly, frustrating. You spent half the time falling into pits. Kids hated it. Parents felt ripped off. Atari had manufactured about 4 million copies, expecting a sell-out. They sold about 1.5 million. The rest? They sat in warehouses, gathering dust and costing the company a fortune in storage fees.
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By September 1983, Atari had had enough. According to contemporary reports from the Alamogordo Daily News, between 10 and 20 semi-trailer trucks arrived at the city landfill. They dumped the stock, and the city crushed it with steamrollers. Why the secrecy? It wasn't actually a "shame" thing, at least not entirely. It was a business move. Atari was closing its plant in El Paso, Texas, and they needed to dump the inventory to claim a tax write-off.
The 2014 Excavation: Fact vs. Fiction
When Joe Lewandowski, who ran a waste management company back in the 80s, helped organize the 2014 dig, he knew exactly where to look. He’d seen the trucks. He knew the concrete was there to keep scavengers (and kids like us) from digging up "free" games.
The documentary Atari: Game Over captured the moment. It was messy.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the E.T. video game landfill is the scale. The legend said 3.5 million copies were buried there. That's a lot of plastic. In reality, the 2014 dig estimated that about 792,000 cartridges were in that hole. It wasn't just E.T. either. They found Centipede, Warlords, and even high-end prototypes.
The burial wasn't some ritualistic suicide of a brand. It was a logistics manager trying to clear floor space.
Interestingly, the condition of the games varied wildly. Some were flattened into "pancakes" by the 1983 steamrollers. Others, remarkably, were still in their original shrink-wrap. When they pulled a copy of E.T. out of the dirt, Howard Scott Warshaw was there to see it. Imagine seeing the thing that supposedly ruined your career being exhumed like an ancient artifact.
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What happened to the recovered games?
The city of Alamogordo didn't just throw them back in a hole. They knew they had gold. Or at least, very expensive trash. They ended up selling about 881 of the recovered cartridges on eBay.
- A single copy of E.T. in its original (distressed) box sold for over $1,500.
- The New Mexico Museum of Space History received a portion of the finds.
- The Smithsonian National Museum of American History even took a copy for their permanent collection.
It’s the ultimate irony. A game labeled as the "worst ever" and dumped in a landfill is now preserved in the same institution that holds the Spirit of St. Louis and the Star-Spangled Banner.
The Economic Reality of the 1983 Crash
We like to blame E.T. for the industry collapse. It's a clean narrative. One bad game kills a multi-billion dollar market. But that's not really how it went down.
The E.T. video game landfill was a symptom, not the cause. The market was flooded. Every company—from Quaker Oats to Purina—was trying to make video games. The quality was abysmal. Retailers were overwhelmed with "shelf-warmers" that no one wanted to buy.
Atari’s mistake was overproduction. They produced more copies of Pac-Man for the 2600 than there were consoles in existence. They assumed everyone would buy a console just to play it. They were wrong. When the bubble burst, the landfill was the only place left for the physical evidence of that greed to go.
If you look at the numbers, Atari's parent company, Warner Communications, saw their stock price crater. They lost half a billion dollars in 1983 alone. The landfill was just a tiny line item in a massive corporate disaster.
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Why We Are Still Obsessed With This Story
There's something deeply human about the E.T. video game landfill. It represents the hubris of the 80s, the "greed is good" mentality hitting a concrete wall. It's also a story about redemption.
For years, people called Howard Scott Warshaw a failure. But look at the code. To build a world with multiple screens, AI-ish enemies (those pesky scientists), and a complex inventory system in five weeks? That's a feat of engineering. The dig proved that people still care. They care enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to dig up garbage.
The landfill is a monument to the end of the first era of gaming. After this, Nintendo arrived with the NES and implemented strict quality controls—the "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality"—specifically to ensure they never ended up with a landfill of their own.
Visiting Alamogordo Today
You can actually go to the site, though there isn't much to see. It's a working landfill. You can't just walk in with a shovel and start digging; the city is pretty strict about that now. But the town has embraced its weird history.
If you're a gaming nerd, it's a pilgrimage.
The story of the E.T. video game landfill has shifted from a cautionary tale to a piece of folklore. It’s a reminder that even in digital industries, there is a physical cost to failure. Every "deleted" file or "failed" app has a physical footprint somewhere. In 1983, that footprint was just a lot easier to find with a bulldozer.
Actionable Takeaways for Collectors and Historians
If you're interested in the "landfill" era of gaming, don't just look for E.T. cartridges. There are better ways to engage with this history.
- Check the Serial Numbers: Many of the "official" landfill games sold by the city come with a certificate of authenticity and a specific tag. If you see an E.T. cart at a flea market, it's likely just a regular retail copy. The landfill copies are usually crushed or have distinct dirt staining.
- Study the Code: You can find the original source code for E.T. online. If you're a programmer, looking at how Warshaw optimized that game for the 128 bytes (not kilobytes, bytes) of RAM in the Atari 2600 is a masterclass in constraint-based design.
- Support Game Preservation: The landfill excavation was funded by a film crew, but many gaming artifacts are lost every day. Support groups like the Video Game History Foundation. They work to save the documentation and hardware that usually ends up in the trash.
- Play the "Fixed" Version: Enthusiasts have actually released "fixed" ROMs of E.T. that solve the pit-detection issues and make the game actually playable. It’s a great way to experience what the game could have been with another month of polish.
The E.T. video game landfill isn't a myth anymore. It's a documented historical event that serves as the "Year Zero" for modern gaming. It reminds us that no matter how big a company gets, they aren't immune to the consequences of rushing a product. Next time you see a buggy, unfinished AAA game released today, just remember: somewhere, there's always a landfill waiting.