Film to reveal why Atari buried 1m copies of ‘worst video game ever’

It was dubbed the worst video game ever made — so bad that Atari buried the million copies made in a landfill deep in the New Mexico desert.

A group of film-makers are hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery by digging up the concrete-covered site in search of the discarded copies of ET: The Extraterrestrial that Atari wanted to hide forever.

The game and its contribution to the demise of Atari have been the source of fascination for video game enthusiasts for 30 years and the search for the cartridges will be featured in a documentary about the biggest video game company of the early 1980s.

“Bottom line, this is just trash. But there is a legend in it, we want to unlock that legend, that mystery,” said a spokeswoman for Xbox Entertainment Studios, one of the companies developing the film, set to be released later this year on Microsoft’s Xbox.

Whether and why Atari decided to bury the million or so copies of the game is part of urban legend.

Kristen Keller, a spokeswoman for Atari, said “nobody here has any idea what that’s about”, and the company had no “corporate knowledge” about the Alamogordo burial. “We’re just watching like everybody else,” she added.

Atari currently manages about 200 classic titles such as Centipede and Asteroids. It was sold to a French firm by Hasbro in 2001.

A New York Times article from September 28, 1983, says 14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and computer equipment were dumped on the site.

Local news reports from the time said that the landfill employees were throwing cartridges there and running a bulldozer over them before covering them with dirt and rubbish. The ET game is among the factors blamed for the decline of Atari and the collapse in the US of a multimillion-dollar video game industry that did not bounce back for several years. Tina Amini, deputy editor at gaming website Kotaku, says the game tanked because “it was practically broken”. A recurring flaw, she said, was that the character of the game, the beloved extraterrestrial, would fall into traps that were almost impossible to escape and would appear constantly and unpredictably. Joe Lewandowski, who became manager of the 300-acre landfill a few months after the cartridge dump and has been a consultant for the documentarians, said they used old photographs and dug exploratory wells to find the actual burial site.

A spokeswoman for Xbox said the upper layers of rubbish had been removed in preparation for the dig. Lewandowski says he remembers how the cartridge dump was a monstrous fiasco for Atari, at least from the perspective of a small desert town. The company, he says, brought truckloads from El Paso, where at the time scavenging was allowed in the city’s landfills. “Here, they didn’t allow scavenging. It was a small landfill, it had a guard,” he said. The guard, however, was either away or unable to stop scores of teenagers from rummaging through the Atari waste and arriving in town trying to sell the discarded products and equipment from the backs of pick-up trucks, Lewandowski, said. “That’s when they decided to pour concrete over.”