The E.T. cartridge landfill myth: True or not?
If you are not familiar with this story, or perhaps even what Atari is, you are likely a bit younger than I am.
Back in the early 80's Atari was the undisputed king of video games... by a lot. I mean there wasn't anyone else that was even close. This lead to them becoming arrogant and they ended up being their own worst enemy as their bold feelings of invincibility lead them to release bad games knowing they were bad, releasing too many games by 3rd parties and also to release bad console after bad console eventually resulting in them going out with a whimper rather than a bang in the early 90's.
In 1983 there was a story about one of the worst video games in history (on many charts it is considered the number one worst) called E.T. that is meant to be the "straw that broke the camel's back" as far as the video game crash was concerned.
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This is one of those stories that probably happens quite a lot in that the game was rushed through development to get released by Christmas - which they succeeded in doing. What consumers got was a game that very few people could even figure out what the hell is going on in it, let alone enjoy it. It was really that bad. Because of this and several other very bad Atari games released around the same time, consumers lost faith in the industry and Atari would later post a loss of over $300 million in 1983.
The myth goes that Atari had thousands or even millions of copies of the E.T. game that they could not sell, so they stealth buried them in a New Mexico landfill. The story remained "unsolved" or in my world "uncared about" until 2014 when a documentary filmmaker unearthed this merchandise in the New Mexico desert in order to complete their narrative confirming the story.
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This part of the story actually is true. That is to say that the film producers didn't just go and fake the placement of this stuff, they actually did find it there. There were thousands of games and consoles buried there at the landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The documentary was about E.T. being there in mass quantities and that it was exclusively what was dumped. The flim-makers kind of paint this in an untrue light because if you look at the footage, it isn't just E.T. games that are buried there, it is a mashup of all sorts of Atari stuff across the spectrum, they just chose to focus on E.T. because that was the overall plot of their doco.
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So the myth is true in a certain sense, but not entirely the way that the myth-makers or the film-makers would have us believe. The story is that Atari buried these E.T. cartridges out of embarrassment for making such a terrible game in an attempt to erase it from history, but the reality is far more corporate than that.
After suffering huge losses in excess of $300 million in 1983, Atari needed to make dramatic changes to their company structure in order to avoid bankruptcy (well, it turns out they just delayed in by about a decade) and one of the restructuring moves they made was to close a massive plant they had operated out of El Paso, Texas for many years. The plant was being relocated to Taiwan in order to save huge amounts of money on production costs - you know? Just like all industries seemed to be doing around that time.
So when they closed the plant in El Paso, they had a bunch of merchandise and incomplete products that they had no chance to monetize in its current state. Transporting it or retrofitting it at the plant in Taiwan wouldn't be cost-effective as far as transport was concerned so they did what a lot of businesses do... dispose of it. The choice to bury it at a landfill in New Mexico wasn't some covert op the way that the myth-makers present it as, because Atari actually told the press they were doing this in 1983. However, they did it in a corporate type way and were not giving information they didn't have to about the specifics of the dump.
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The only real mystery (which isn't much of a mystery at all) is why they chose to bury it so far away from El Paso. They did this because Alamogordo was the closest landfill that had laws protecting looting of the dump. In and around El Paso, things in the dump can be taken by anyone that wants it and this is not the case in Alamogordo.
So, in conclusion the myth is false about the massive E.T. cartridge dump. While E.T. was a big piece of the puzzle as to why this dump needed to happen in the first place, it was simply a corporate decision to dump everything at the plant not just millions of E.T. cartridges. There are just as many other carts at the site as there was E.T. stuff, it was just presented in a different way for the sake of the "tell all" (not tell all) documentary that didn't even get widespread appeal anyway.