Excavating the Atari E.T. Video Game Burial Site

(dramatic music)

[Chris] According to legend, 30 years ago

Atari buried truckloads of video games in this desert.

Welcome to you guys.

Thank you for coming out, we really appreciate it.

We are gonna start digging in a minute.

Our goal is to find some evidence of the burial

of Atari products down here in Alamogordo.

We hope we'll find the E.T. game.

We have not found anything yet.

All right, it's day two of our coverage

of the Atari excavation.

They have brought in the media, they have brought in

the public, and they have brought in winds

that are supposed to get up to a hundred miles an hour

from the south today, blowing garbage dust

all around this landfill.

The illuminati of retro video gaming have come out

for this historic event, so we are going to speak

with Howard Scott Warshaw.

He is the designer of E.T.

We are going to talk to video game designer

and historian, Mike Mika.

We are going to talk to Ernie Cline.

He is the author of the incredible book

Ready Player One.

They are here, Wired is gonna to talk to all of them today

as we dig up the Atari treasure trove of legend.

For a company that's really in dire financial straits

to take all this inventory that's supposedly worthless

and literally truck it out into the desert

and cover it up with cement and mash it over with tractors,

the kind of thing you do with nuclear waste,

just seems absurd, it seems ridiculous.

So, on that level I always thought

it can't possibly be true, (laughs) and here it is.

I mean, we're here looking at the excavation,

which I never really believed the stuff would be here.

(dramatic music)

When I was a kid I read this story

and it was almost mythical to me,

because why would a company like Atari dump so many games?

So, I'm here to kind of complete this 30 year mission

of mine to find out what happened to these games,

if they even exist, what is this thing all about?

The video game crash and kinda the death of Atari

is all linked and blamed on E.T. the video game.

I played the hell out of E.T. and thought it was

one of the most innovative Atari games of the time.

(upbeat electronic music)

[Man] Been here for a while already.

It's...

Since early morning.

Yeah, since the morning.

It's tedious, the wind's horrible.

We're wondering if they're gonna find anything or not,

'cause it's all just diggin' up

lots of trash and everything.

It's kinda gross smelling right now at the moment.

(dramatic music)

It seems like they found something.

We see a lot of smiling faces.

They're bringin' some stuff over

to the archaeologist's table right now.

Zak is about to speak.

Let's see what's goin' on.

We found an intact E.T. the video game.

(crowd cheers)

E.T. is definitely here.

The legend was so awesome, it's kind of a shame

to finally figure it out, right?

I think it was almost better to be

the legend of what it was.

When I first made these games the whole point

was about entertaining people,

like this right now behind me.

It's still entertaining people.

Now it's no longer a legend, right now it's a fact.

Everybody standin' around here.

Joe said they're there, well...

Yeah, again, I wasn't nervous 'til we got down

to that where he was almost reachin' his max length.

But yeah, it was a big weight off my shoulders

when that bucket came up from there.

And E.T., it's not just Asteroids, but E.T. was there, too.

Here we are, I am actually holding

one of the E.T. cartridges that was pulled

out of the landfill.

It was a legend in the video game industry

for three decades and now, finally,

we can say with absolute certainty that it is true.

Atari was really buried out here in the New Mexico desert

and Wired brought it to you first.

Thanks guys.

(upbeat electronic music)

Hello there, I'm Howard Scott Warshaw,

designer of Yars' Revenge,

Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.

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