A documentary crew has received approval to dig up the New Mexico desert site where Atari supposedly buried millions of unsold pieces of Atari 2600 software and hardware. The crew hopes to finally confirm or refute one of gaming's most enduring urban legends once and for all.
The city council in Alamogordo, New Mexico granted approval this week for Ottawa-based multimedia and marketing firm Fuel Industries to excavate the site some time in the next six months for a documentary it's filming, local news site KRQE reports. This year also marks what will be the 30 year anniversary of the assumed September 1983 burial, which came during the height of the great video game crash. That sudden market reversal supposedly left Atari with millions of unsold and unsalable cartridges and systems, which were dumped in an Alamogordo landfill and later covered in concrete.
While at least one Atari employee has cast doubts on the plausibility of the story, the dumping was reported in contemporaneous reports in the Alamogordo Daily News and The New York Times. The former paper got confirmation from the garbage disposal company that was used for the burial, and the latter got confirmation from an Atari spokesperson, so it's pretty unlikely the production company is walking into an Al Capone's vault-type situation.
Still, there are questions that remain unanswered. While the 3.5 million unsold copies of E.T. are most commonly cited as the likely bulk of the burial, reports suggest the dump may also contain unsold consoles, PCs, and even prototypes of the Atari Mindlink controller. There's significant disagreement as to how much material was dumped in the landfill, with reports ranging from 9 to 20 full dump trucks.
Personally, we're hoping Fuel Industries decides to chip away portions of the massive dumping and sell them off to collectors, Berlin Wall-style. After all, who wouldn't love to own a piece of gaming history that can also serve as a paperweight?
Film crew to dig up Atari landfill site, maybe score 3.5 million copies of E.T.
