Warner Communications no relation North American video game crash of 1983
The Atari video game burial was a mass burial of unsold video game cartridges, consoles, and computers in a New Mexico landfill site, undertaken by the American video game and home computer company Atari, Inc. in 1983. Before 2014, the goods buried were rumored to be unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), one of the largest commercial video game failures and often cited as one of the worst video games ever released, and the 1982 Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which was commercially successful but critically maligned.
Since the burial was first reported, there had been doubts as to its veracity and scope, and it was frequently dismissed as an urban legend. The event became a cultural icon and a reminder of the video game crash of 1983; it was the end result of a disastrous fiscal year which saw Atari, Inc. sold off by its parent company Warner Communications. Though it was believed that millions of copies of E.T. were buried, Atari officials later verified the numbers to be around 700,000 cartridges of various games, including E.T.
In 2014, Fuel Industries, Microsoft, and others worked with the New Mexico government to excavate the site as part of a documentary, Atari: Game Over. On April 26, 2014, the excavation revealed discarded games and hardware. Only a small fraction, about 1,300 cartridges, were recovered, with a portion given for curation and the rest auctioned to raise money for a museum to commemorate the burial.Cultural symbolism and speculation
All of these factors led to wide speculation that most of the 3.5 million unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ultimately wound up in this landfill, crushed and encased in concrete. It had also been reported that prototypes for the proposed Atari Mindlink controller system were disposed of at the site, which only further fueled speculation, since Atari Museum owner Curt Vendel actually currently owns the Mindlink prototypes. Writing for the Pacific Historical Review, John Wills speculated that location's place in the public psyche—its proximity to the sites of both the Trinity nuclear test and Roswell UFO incident—aided the popularity of the story.The conflicting information surrounding the burial led to the claim of it being an "E.T. Dump" being referred to as an urban legend, which in turn led to a degree of skepticism and doubt over the veracity of the dumping story itself, and the relevance of conflating the event with the later industry downturn. In October 2004, Howard Scott Warshaw, the programmer responsible for the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game, expressed doubts at the time that the destruction of millions of copies of the game ever took place. Warshaw also believes that Atari's downfall was more a result of their business practices—including alleged block booking of poorly selling games with successful ones when dealing with distributors—than any specific failed games. This latter view has been echoed by Travis Fahs of IGN, who believes that Atari's problems, including their huge surplus of unsold stock, arose from the company's overestimation of the sustainability of Atari 2600 sales, rather than being due to the individual quality of games being released.The incident has also become something of a cultural symbol representative of the video game crash of 1983, often cited as a cautionary tale about the hubris of poor business practices, despite suggestions that the burial allowed the company to write off the disposed-of material for tax relief purposes.
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