Atari video game burial: from landfill to museums
The Atari video game burial involved around 700,000 cartridges from various games, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. A popular story says millions of E.T. copies went into the New Mexico desert, but the disposal included a wider mix of material. Atari buried unsold cartridges, consoles, and computers at a landfill in Alamogordo in 1983. The event became a cultural symbol of that year's video game crash, while doubts continued about its scope. Its setting was a company facing a disastrous financial year, with discarded inventory becoming part of a story that later drew filmmakers and archaeologists to the landfill.
Atari's financial reversal followed extraordinary growth. Warner Communications bought it in 1976 for $28 million, and its net worth reached $2 billion by 1982. It represented 80% of the video gaming market and more than half of Warner's revenue. Growth in the following year was expected to be around 50%, but on December 7, 1982, Atari reported earnings growth of only 10 to 15%. Warner's shares fell by a third the next day, and its quarterly profits dropped by 56%. Atari lost $536 million in 1983. Warner sold it off the following year.
Unsold games were part of that pressure. Atari made 12 million cartridges for its home version of Pac-Man despite having sold around 10 million Atari 2600 consoles. Released in March 1982, it shipped 7 million units but left more than 5 million unsold cartridges, with refunds adding to the problem. E.T. followed a costly film-licensing deal, reportedly worth $20 to $25 million. Delays left programmer Howard Scott Warshaw only five weeks to finish it for the holiday period. Large quantities remained unsold. Distributors also returned stock after Atari had asked them to place their 1982 orders all at once, expecting stronger sales than materialized.
Local reporting placed the Atari video game burial at the landfill south of Alamogordo. In September 1983, the Alamogordo Daily News reported between 10 and 20 truckloads of boxes, cartridges, and systems arriving from an Atari storehouse in El Paso, Texas. The landfill prohibited scavenging and crushed and buried garbage nightly. Atari official Bruce Enten said the company was mostly sending broken and returned material. A representative later confirmed to The New York Times that the inventory came from an El Paso plant being closed and converted to a recycling facility. Guards prevented reporters and the public from checking the contents directly.
Children nevertheless recovered games from the dump, with contemporary reporting naming E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Defender, and Berzerk. Starting on September 29, a concrete layer was poured over the crushed material. An anonymous worker said the aim was to prevent children from getting hurt while digging among material that included dead animals. City officials protested the volume of Atari's dumping, and the local manager ordered it to stop. Alamogordo subsequently passed an Emergency Management Act and established an Emergency Management Task Force to restrict the garbage contractor's flexibility in taking outside business.
The Atari video game burial returned to public view through plans for a documentary. On May 28, 2013, the city commission gave Fuel Industries six months of landfill access for filming Atari: Game Over and excavating the site. Environmental concerns briefly stalled the work, but were resolved in early April 2014. The public excavation began on April 26, attended by Warshaw, author Ernest Cline, director Zak Penn, and local residents. James Heller, the former Atari manager responsible for the disposal, also attended. He said he had ordered the concrete covering and gave a more specific original total of 728,000 buried cartridges.
The excavation recovered about 1,300 cartridges. Mayor Susie Galea said the remaining material lay deeper than expected, making it harder to reach. The recovered cartridges represented 59 games, mostly for the Atari 2600, with six Atari 5200 titles. Hardware also emerged. Archaeologists Andrew Reinhard, Richard Rothaus, and Bill Caraher examined and documented the material, supported by historians Raiford Guins and Bret Weber. The burial was refilled afterward. Joseph Lewandowski, who had helped organize the work with the city, characterized it as a single opportunity to recover material because another similar event was not expected to receive the city's agreement.
Objects from the Atari video game burial then entered museums and auctions. Some went to the New Mexico Museum of Space History for display and sale, while 100 artifacts went to documentary producers Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment. A computing history museum in Cambridge received items for permanent display, and the Smithsonian took an E.T. cartridge. Alamogordo approved auctions in September 2014 through eBay and the council website. By April 2025, sales of about 880 cartridges had raised over $107,000, including more than $1,500 for one E.T. copy. The proceeds supported city public works and the Tularosa Basin Museum of History.