Back when I was in undergrad, some friends and I decided to spend our Spring Break taking a road trip to Alamogordo, New Mexico, to make a documentary about the Atari E.T. game failure. Long story short, the game was a flop, and according to the folklore millions of copies were buried in a landfill in that city.
Unfortunately, lack of funds kept us from our mission. Occassionally I’ll be contacted about our attempt, and while there really isn’t much to say, I always try to contribute. The latest publication es en español, so I’ll add my original quote in English after the break.
The article seems to take excerpts from the following quotes:
We didn’t get too far into specifics before the reality of the costs of the project set in. (Gas prices rose drastically in the US during 2008, and we didn’t have a very efficient vehicle.) However, I did schedule an interview with the mayor of Alamogordo, New Mexico (which we canceled, obviously), and we uncovered news articles from around that time.
The most important thing I realized is that the story may in fact just be a myth! There’s certainly a lot of evidence that it happened, but there’s also certainly not a fenced in pile of dirt with an “Atari” sign hanging on the side anywhere.
Apparently that location is now a parking lot. I don’t think the owners would have appreciated us trying to dig… but yeah, we’d probably find some dirt there and try anyway. It would have been a great scene at least.