saw this article on video game myths on Yahoo and had to check out the Atari one, since Atari brings back good memories of my youth! full article with other video game myths found here.
Million of Atari games are buried in the New Mexico desert.
Anyone who experienced the mind-cramping pain of attempting to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 knows that one of two things should happen to any copy of that game: it should be burned or buried. As it turns out, Atari opted for the latter...in a big way.
In early 1983, things could not have been going worse for Atari. The one-time king of the home video game consoles had suddenly found itself in enormous debt after a series of unfortunate events: competing systems from Coleco and Mattel were stealing market share, the new Atari 5200 was panned for being unwieldy, and low sales of its troubled Pac-Man port and its legendarily bad tie-in to Steven Spielberg's smash hit E.T. gave the software giant a black eye. As consumer interest waned, retailers returned boatloads of unused stock to an Atari warehouse in El Paso.
And by boatloads, we mean millions of games. So what does an ailing company do with roughly 10 million cartridges it can't sell to a disinterested customer base? How about poke around New Mexico for a suitable dumping ground and bury the problem altogether?
That's precisely what happened. According to the Alamogordo Daily News and confirmed by the New York Times, a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico provided the answer to Atari's cartridge conundrum. To be safe, they steamrolled the mound of product flat and, for good measure, covered the resulting game pancake in concrete.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
Anyone who experienced the mind-cramping pain of attempting to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 knows that one of two things should happen to any copy of that game: it should be burned or buried. As it turns out, Atari opted for the latter...in a big way.
In early 1983, things could not have been going worse for Atari. The one-time king of the home video game consoles had suddenly found itself in enormous debt after a series of unfortunate events: competing systems from Coleco and Mattel were stealing market share, the new Atari 5200 was panned for being unwieldy, and low sales of its troubled Pac-Man port and its legendarily bad tie-in to Steven Spielberg's smash hit E.T. gave the software giant a black eye. As consumer interest waned, retailers returned boatloads of unused stock to an Atari warehouse in El Paso.
And by boatloads, we mean millions of games. So what does an ailing company do with roughly 10 million cartridges it can't sell to a disinterested customer base? How about poke around New Mexico for a suitable dumping ground and bury the problem altogether?
That's precisely what happened. According to the Alamogordo Daily News and confirmed by the New York Times, a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico provided the answer to Atari's cartridge conundrum. To be safe, they steamrolled the mound of product flat and, for good measure, covered the resulting game pancake in concrete.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
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