As legends go, Atari's mass dump of cartridges of their game E.T. was always a good one. It wasn't just a big pile of garbage being placed in a New Mexico landfill, it was Atari burying any good will they had with consumers with a subpar product, and almost burying the video game industry with its mismanagement. The image of a large quantity of cartridges buried in the desert - numbers increasing as the years go by in order to make the dump more impressive - is something evocative and even amusing. It's a cautionary tale, it's dark comedy and as it turns out, it actually happened.
Filmmakers have excavated the cartridges from their grave in New Mexico. As expected, the majority of the dump site consists of battered and crushed copies of the game adaptation of E.T., a game commonly regarded as one of the worst ever made, mostly because it's as much a symbol as it is a hastily made adaptation of a popular film. There were also other games in there, including some which were not commonly regarded as outright terrible. From what I can gather from different sources, the mass dump of product wasn't out of spite or shame, but the result of closing a warehouse filled with unsold product. The most unsold product just happened to be E.T.
What we have is a rare case of an urban legend actually being verified. It's not ancient history, it only happened a little over thirty years ago, but since Atari had been shuffled through a variety of different owners and nobody thought to talk to the people who owned the landfill, it had taken on a mythical quality. The story was almost too good, the perfect ending of Atari's dramatic rise and fall from relevance. It was not the actual end of Atari, the company still had many mistakes to make and even still technically exists, though not as the cultural force it once was, but it was the ending of the Atari era, as they briefly killed home gaming and were replaced by Nintendo in people's living rooms.
It is actually nice to have such a legend being proven right, though the big fish story regarding the number of buried cartridges will likely have to be revised downward. There are many such stories out there, some of which are definitely made up, but that get circulated anyway for the same reasons. They are funny, for starters, they give people a sense that these major corporations are fallible, and they can often be used to explain why things fail. In this case, it is a warning against hubris, and how if a company makes a sub-par product, it will just be a burden and eventually thrown in the garbage.
When I first heard of the plan to go to the desert and dig up copies of a game nobody actually wanted in the first place, I thought it was foolish. It's going to be a lot of work to confirm the existence of something nobody wants anyway, after all. But now that the legend has been confirmed, I will admit to being glad. So many of these stories feel as though they can't actually be true, they're too perfect, they feel like fiction because it's difficult to believe the real world would ever provide us with such an ideal tale. To learn the Atari story is not actually fake is great because there is finally a story of hubris and disaster that ends in the perfect manner, and now we can confirm that it was all the truth.
