Show & Tell is a young mental_floss feature spotlighting notable and revealing token from museum and archive around the world . Look for young item each week .
In 1982 , Atari 2600 game consoles sold very well , and the ship’s company ’s corporate parent , Warner Communications , was pleased with its net income . But for avariety of reasonsinternal and external , Atari ’s bubble split in tardy 1982 , and 1983 was financially fatal . To make issue worse , Atari overpaid for the right to make a licensedE.T. : The Extraterrestrialgame , and then rushed the biz into production ; the character of the biz suffered , and the entire nonstarter of the hyped - up release was awkward .
occupant of Alamogordo , New Mexico , start reporting in September 1983 that truckloads of Atari good had been dumped in a landfill outside of town . In their history of Atari , Curt Vendel and Marty Goldbergwritethat this hardware , from a company plant life in El Paso , Texas , finish up in Alamogordo because the troupe wanted to knock down with discreetness , and “ New Mexico had a state police force forbidding scavenging of landfill . ” But locals began to cull up cartridge and cabinet from the wasteyard anyway , and eventually the Good Book got out .
By the close of the calendar month , the national jam was on the type . The New York Timesran anitemon the dump , guide to it as another strategy deploy by a company stuck in a “ video game job gone dark ” and despairing to divest itself of inventory . Too late , the troupe ordered that concrete be poured over the burying site , deterring token - hunting watch . That concrete seal the deal : The desert Atari dump became alegendof nostalgic nerd culture , with the chronicle pass around that there were millions ofE.T.cartridges in the priming coat in New Mexico .
In 2013 , Fuel Entertainment received permission to unearth the web site and videotape the excavation for a documentary . What they regain in April 2014 was not a solid mass ofE.T.games ( though there were a few hundred examples on hand ) . The haul was more interracial : console and estimator parts , manuals and warranty , as well as many types of game cartridges . ( Vendel and Goldbergwritethat a bigger burial of cartridges took place in Sunnyvale , California , but that trash dump somehow escaped notice . )
The City of Alamogordo donate items from the unearthing to museum , let in The Henry Ford and the Smithsonian , and sold some of the objects on eBay . announce the acquisition in July 2015 , The Henry Ford ’s Digital Collections & Content Manager Ellice Engdahl intromit that the items that came from the unburying were “ unpleasant to handle , ” adding : “ We can now vouch that material recovered from a landfill continues to smell like a landfill for quite some time . ” The Henry Ford now holds avariety of itemsfrom the Alamogordo jibe : catalogs , manuals , controllers , magazine , even asoil sample , cover in a double Ziploc baggie .
artefact recovered from the Atari dig . picture courtesy the collections of The Henry Ford .
Soil recover from the Atari barb . Image courtesy the collections of The Henry Ford .
Why expend resources on recovering , cataloging , and bear on electronic detritus , much less the turd that lay to rest it ? The objects are , after all , not precious in a monetary sense . ( like cartridge and consoles are useable on eBay for not very much money . ) A group of five archaeologists who hang the digexplained their interest group in the site inThe Atlanticafter the digging was complete , arguing that it was important for these artifacts to be unearthed allot to a readiness of measure uncouth to the discipline of archaeology . They wrote that they were concerned in “ revers[ing ] expectations of a culture that values the past tense only if it is old and unique . ”
The neglect hardware pulled from the Alamogordo landfill speaks volume about the diligence ’s booms and busts , the struggle between incorporated parents and the creative workers at videogame companies , and the disposability of consumer culture . These dynamics , just coming into focus in the former 1980s , would cover to specify the videogame industry for decades to get along ; we can look upon this “ trash , ” and cerebrate of this .
