The discovery of Atari E.T. game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill could provide answers about whether the games were dumped there by company officials in the 1980s.
According to the Associated Press, an Atari manager reportedly discarded cartridges of the famed E.T. game in a landfill upon request from the company in 1983 to find a cheap way to dispose of them. This event allegedly came after revenue from sales dipped significantly during the North American Video Game Crash of 1983.
The former employee told AP he did not know about the issue surrounding his actions since no one raised concern in the event, which was thought to have ended the gaming industry at the time.
"I never heard about it again until June 2013, when I read an article about E.T. being excavated," he said.
A Georgia Tech professor told Ars Technica the New Mexico landfill discovery still could not answers people's questions about the game's existence.
"Urban legend is now anything you didn't already read on the Internet," Georgia Tech professor and author of Atari history book "Racing the Beam" Ian Bogost said, following this weekend's excavation. "This isn't just a games thing. Anything one hasn't personally read online or can find in a Top 20 Google results becomes obscured to the point of legend...People seem to think not knowing something makes it a myth... because they only heard about it as presented as legend, rather than in historical context."
According to AP, movie crews from Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment studios were in possession of additional Atari 2600 cartridges, among other items from the landfill.
Atari launched the company's game 2600 in 1977 before ending its run in 1983.
"Very few people have ever played E.T. for Atari," Bogost told Ars Technia. "Still fewer have tried to appreciate it in context... Mostly it's an idea, a sh---y game that destroyed the industry, a talisman of some kind... the idea being that if you find it, you can somehow use it to ward off future peril... [It's] an object to hate, a simple answer to the '83 crash."
Bogost said people often want to know about a theory, rather than what actually is true.
"The idea of things is more important than their reality," Bogost said. "The idea of the game is what this [excavation] is after, though, not the game itself. The legendary E.T., the E.T. that ruined the industry, etc... Even though, once you find it, then what? Then you take Instagrams, that's what."
