Atari's E.T. games unearthed from New Mexico landfill after more than 30 years

Shawn Knight

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atari mexico landfill et

A team of diggers and filmmakers searching an Alamogordo, New Mexico, landfill for remnants of Atari E.T. games struck gold over the weekend. Led by archaeologist Andrew Reinhard, the team unearthed hundreds of copies of the game that many consider to the worst title ever made.

Nearly 200 local residents and game enthusiasts convened on the dig site Saturday in hopes of uncovering the truth but strong winds and the stench of rotting garbage drove most away before the first games were uncovered a few hours in.

Zak Penn, who is directing a documentary on the subject for Xbox Entertainment Studios, said he was relieved and psyched that people actually got to see something. It’s unclear just yet how many games are on site although Penn added that they found a hell of a lot of games in the initial dig.

So, what’s with all the fuss over some old E.T. cartridges in a landfill in New Mexico?

As the story goes, Atari paid tens of millions of dollars to director Steven Spielberg for the licensing rights to the hit 1982 film. The company wanted to capitalize on the success of the movie and rushed the game to store shelves within a matter of weeks.

Needless to say, that was a terrible plan. Despite selling around 1.5 million copies early on, the game quickly stalled and ended up costing the company $500 million. Rumor has it that Atari cut their losses and buried the unsold cartridges in a landfill which we now know to be accurate.

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OK - so now what? Although marginally interesting, not sure if it was really worth the cost or effort.
 
(indy voice) dont send the cartridges to ebay! they belong in a museum!
 
This was an interesting story, I really enjoyed reading about this whole search and the fact it turned out to be true.
 
So.... um.... do they work? Been buried a long time. I don't suppose the retail box could've protected them good enough for functionality to remain.I don't know why I'm curious, I just am.
 
Call home......call home............................call home..........................<pfft - sound of electronics frying>
 
I have Colecovision with module that supports act-vision Pitfall a bunch others plus ATARI games too for 2600. Still after all these years the system still works. Coleco made some fun games like ZaXxon or Super ZaXxon both the cart and the cassette like data tape which support 250KB on single drive and if you were lucky to have dual drives that's 500KB on Coleco Adam Family Computer that uses a daisy wheel printer/PSU source.
 
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