The Great Atari 'ET' Landfill Dig: Here's What They Found

This weekend, a documentary crew got their hands dirty happily rifling through the trash of a New Mexico landfill in search of the holy grail of video gaming legend: a dumped stash of the infamously bad ET Atari game, ET the Extra Terrestrial.

They found what they were looking for. On Saturday, several hours after the diggers started scooping up waste, the first reports came out that the team had unearthed an ET cartridge. The myth was proven. Xbox, which is developing the film of the Atari story alongside Fuel Entertainment and Lightbox, announced that they’d found “lots of boxes,” including other games.

Fresh home from the dig site at Alamogordo, New Mexico, I caught up again with the team behind the project to find out more about their landfill spoils. Fuel Entertainment CEO Mike Burns and vice president Gerhard Runken gave me the run-down, this time joined by development executive Daniel Schechter, who they credited as their “legs on the ground” for the past year, and the person responsible for making their idea for the ET hunt a reality.

So what exactly did they find? “A lot of dirty diapers, and then we finally got to the cartridges,” said Burns, to laughter from the others. He admitted that, after a few initial test digs brought up nothing, the situation on Saturday was “a bit touch and go.”

Xbox reported that local garbage contractor Joe Lewandowski had played detective to pinpoint where he thought the cartridges were buried, and the team said that as the hours went by he got visibly more stressed. When the diggers got to about 20 feet down, Burns said, “He was visibly distraught that we were going to let everybody down, that the cartridges just weren’t in that spot.”

A scoop was brought up and dumped, and the crew dashed over to sort through it—but it was a false alarm. Then, twenty minutes later, director Zak Penn came over with his bucket one of the archaeologists: they’d found a cartridge.

Hundreds of fans were present, and even the designer of the fated ET game, Howard Scott Warshaw, was there. “You could see the visible emotion on his face,” said Burns.

It was pretty remarkable that, 30 years after the games were dumped, the team was able to find them in the now-unused landfill, which stretches hundreds of acres over flat desert, with no real identifying markers anywhere. Schechter said that according to Lewandowski, they would never have revealed that first cartridge if they were just a few feet off in one direction. “For them on their first dig to find it—the records they kept for 30 years in that magical folder they had were pretty amazing.”

Conditions were hardly ideal, with strong winds causing quite a dust storm around the dig and creating an atmosphere Burns described as “like that Raiders of the Lost Ark moment, when everyone’s faces are melting at the end of the movie and all the wind is blowing.” They all covered up in bandanas and glasses and were soon smothered in filth from the excavation.

The team doesn’t have an exact count of what they found yet, as the city first has to check that all of the unearthed cartridges are safe and clean, given that they were buried under regular trash in various states of decomposition. The diggers brought up bucket after bucket, which was sifted through. Each cartridge will be put in a  ziploc bag and catalogued before going to storage, after which the documentary makers will be given a portion of the stash. They never planned to dig up every single game, something that could be very costly and time-consuming, and reckon they brought up somewhere around 1,000 cartridges the day they were there.

It wasn’t just ET, either—they said they found copies of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Centipede, Circus, Breakout, and possibly others too, as well as broken bits of console like the Atari’s grill. “The cool thing about this whole thing was a lot of people were like, there might be cartridges down there but they might be destroyed or prototypes, but when they pulled the first ones up, they were complete, in boxes, with instructions—complete cartridges that you could probably plug in and play,” said Burns. That supports the story that Atari dumped the cartridges because of the game’s flop. “These were not just seconds or broken cartridges or defects from a factory; these were actually good-to-go retail products.”

Although they had a couple of consoles hooked up to TVs at the site, they weren’t able to test the games because of the dust. As anyone who’s ever tried to blow on an old-school game cartridge in a frantic effort to make it work will know, dust and games consoles don’t really get along. But they’re confident they’ll be in working order. “Based on how they were in the box, I would say for sure that they were playable,” said Runken.

When they get their percentage of the haul back to LA, they plan to authenticate and number the pieces, and hope to give them to fans in the lead-up to the film’s launch. More details about the documentary, which is an original for Xbox and tentatively titled Atari: Game Over, should be available around Comic Con.

If the hundreds of fans who braved the dust storm to attend the dig are anything to go by, there are a fair few nostalgic gamers keen to see the final results of the dig. “I think the most powerful part wasn’t seeing the cartridges, it was actually seeing the reaction of the fans and the people, just what it really means to them, how special Atari is,” said Runken of the moment the first game was recovered. “It had a place in their heart.”