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On September 26, 1983, after the crash of the home video game market, Atari buried over 700,000 video game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Due to looting of the site, it was eventually covered in concrete. (Video Games, Event)

Atari: Game Over / Zak Penn / USA / 2014

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Once considered an urban legend, on April 26, 2014, an excavation of a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, confirmed that after the home video game crash, Atari had buried over 700,000 game cartridges and consoles back on September 26, 1983. The event was chronicled in the documentary "Atari: Game Over". (Event, Video Game)

With Ready Player One on the way, I decided to revisit Atari: Game Over, a 2014 documentary about the efforts to excavate the New Mexico landfill containing Atari video games buried by the company in 1983. Central to the story is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which played a major role in sinking Atari after the company paid too much for the license, gave designer Howard Scott Warshaw only five weeks to program it, and produced too many cartridges.

The RPO connections are numerous: Zak Penn directed it, Ernest Cline shows up in his DeLorean to witness the dig, and Steven Spielberg features in the development of E.T., signing off on the premise without knowing about the time crunch. The dig itself, of course, is a nostalgia-fueled treasure hunt, one which proves quite emotional for Warshaw as his past is literally unearthed.

#atari game over #video games