unburying E.T...

unburying E.T...

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E.T.: Uncovering the Legendary Buried Atari Games of New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert


E.T. and other abandoned Atari games in New Mexico landfill


For years, everyone thought it was an urban legend. It sounds like one, after all; a company ashamed of their biggest failure yet, taking every copy left of the Atari game based on ET, driving into the New Mexico desert and burying them beneath the sand and concrete. There were even specifics: it all happened on September 22, 1983, and there were 13 truckloads of the game buried in a landfill in Alamogordo. A few people claimed to have found some scattered cartridges, swearing that it was true… But those unconfirmed reports are what makes for a great urban legend, aren’t they?

atari-et-landfil-alamogordo-2


The internet labelled ET the worst video game ever made, and it’s been blamed for the fall of Atari. Steven Spielberg was unimpressed (although he’d given it his approval), and it came on the heels of another computer game from the same programmer, which was universally lauded: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

the buried Atari games became something of an urban legend


It wasn’t until April of 2014 that curiosity seekers and fans alike finally uncovered the truth: the urban legend arising from E.T. was at least partially real. While it was claimed that millions of cartridges were buried in the desert landfill, only about 1,300 were ever found. A former Atari manager confirmed that in total, around 728,000 copies of various games that had been deposited there in the days before the original company was split up.

until the abandoned video games were rediscovered in 2014


The E.T. cartridges would later sell on eBay for $108,000. Others were kept in an archive, sent to various museums, and distributed to the film company that made the documentary Atari: Game Over, about tracking down the reality behind the urban legend. The money was divvied up between a local historical society and the City of Alamogordo… but what about the man behind one of the most notorious video games in history?

a trashed copy of Defender seen in the landfill


Howard Scott Warshaw was one of Atari’s best programmers, which is why he was assigned the almost impossible task of creating E.T. in only five weeks. At 24-years-old, he was hand-picked for the job after Spielberg himself had proclaimed him to be nothing less than a genius. And so he was, but completing what was normally an eight-month project in five weeks was clearly asking the impossible.

E.T. and other buried Atari games sold for thousands on eBay


Despite the pressure, Warshaw did it, but, by Christmas, the bugs in the game were so evident that E.T. clearly wasn’t going to be the hit Atari needed. The company declared losses of $310 million. Warshaw, who had been thrilled by the fact that he’d even been able to meet Atari’s insane timetable, left the industry and went into real estate.


Disliking the property industry, he drifted back to the gaming industry and TV production. But eventually, in 2008, he went back to school to retrain as a psychotherapist, working with those in the industry that he’d started out in.


Warshaw was there when the desert finally gave up its valuable stockpile of retro video games. According to an interview he later gave to the BBC, he was thrilled to see the game he’d laboured on for five weeks generating so much excitement.

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