![]() cartridge, and announced, “We found something.” The crew filled bucket after bucket with games-yes, some copies of E.T., but also more commercially successful titles like Centipede, Space Invaders, and Asteroid. They cheered when workers unearthed the first Atari artifact of the day, a joystick, and they cheered more loudly when Zak Penn, who is directing Microsoft’s documentary, approached the crowd, held up an E.T. The fans who traveled to Alamogordo to witness the excavation clearly wanted the games to be there. guess was a good one, though, because Atari had produced many more copies of the game than people wanted. The Times and local media recorded fourteen trucks dumping merchandise from Atari’s El Paso factory in September, 1983, but Atari representatives didn’t allow anyone to get close enough to see exactly what was being buried. Until Saturday, no one knew for sure what was buried in Alamogordo. The excavation project was Burns’s brainchild, and his staff spent eighteen months securing permits from local officials and funding from Microsoft’s Xbox Entertainment Studios, which in turn hired the producers Simon and Jonathan Chinn to make a documentary about the dig. of the marketing company Fuel Entertainment, told me after the dig. “It was pretty tense right up until we found the cartridges,” Mike Burns, the C.E.O. cartridges numbered in the thousands, not the millions. Saturday’s dig confirmed that the legend is true, although the archaeologists on hand estimated that the E.T. This is partly, perhaps, because of its proximity to the real Roswell, but also because they’re both rumored to be hiding aliens: the dump was said to hold more than three million copies of the famously awful Atari adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” Unwanted products routinely end up in landfills, but the sudden desert burial of countless games, associated with an iconic movie and adapted for an iconic console, was material colorful enough for a legend. The landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, about ninety miles north of El Paso, is the gaming world’s Roswell. ![]()
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