Depending on your point of view, a selection of vintage game cartridges recently listed on eBay are either priceless pieces of video game history and lore, or just a bunch of trash that someone is trying to hawk on the Internet. Both of these perspectives are true: it’s the cartridges’ status as trash that makes them so valuable and interesting in the first place. [More]
E.T.
Dump Expedition Uncovers “E.T.” Atari Cartridges After 3 Hours
By 4.28.14
Every society needs its legends and cautionary tales, and the Atari graveyard in New Mexico was one for Americans of the video game generation. Did the company really dump millions of unsold games in the desert in 1983 and never speak of it again? As part of an upcoming documentary on Atari, a crew excavated the rumored dump site in Almogordo, NM. Within three hours, they freed the first cartridges from the pit. [More]
Date Set For “E.T.” Atari Cartridges Landfill Dig: April 26
By 4.14.14
The world still doesn’t know for sure whether there really are millions of unsold copies of the game “E.T.” for the Atari 2500 buried in a landfill in New Mexico. Maybe that secret would have stayed buried if not for the team who thought that it might be fun and worthwhile to search for them and make a documentary film about the process. [More]
Search For E.T. Atari Cartridges In The Desert Is Still Happening – Or Maybe Not
By 3.24.14
Last June, we shared with you the exciting news that a documentary film crew would be searching the New Mexico desert for a video game legend. They would dig up the desert landfill where millions of unsold copies of the notoriously terrible 1982 Atari game E.T. were allegedly interred. What happened with that? Not much, it turns out. [More]
Movie Studio Set To Comb Desert Landfill For Notoriously Terrible ‘E.T.’ Atari Game
By 6.4.13
There is a legend, a legend of a magical place filled with millions of copies of the notoriously terrible 1982 E.T. title, among other failed Atari games. According to gamer lore, after the title flopped, millions of Atari cartridges were buried somewhere in the desert of New Mexico, perhaps in an attempt to forever bury the shame of the game’s extreme terribleness. Now one film company has been granted the rights to search a landfill in a quest to see if the legend is real. [More]
