How thousands of Atari games from an El Paso warehouse ended up buried in the New Mexico desert

It’s been referred to as the game that sank Atari.

“E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was released in 1982 and unlike the Steven Spielberg movie, this “E.T.” flopped badly, leaving the game-maker holding hundreds of thousands of unsold copies.

Fast forward to 2014, and a rumor circulated that Atari had their stockpile of “E.T.” games buried in a New Mexico landfill. Then lo and behold, excavators uncovered a treasure trove of old Atari games and consoles. Rumor confirmed.

But wait, where were these games before they ended up at the dump?

Gwen Howerton, Texas culture reporter for Chron.com, joined the Standard to talk about the back story. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Before we go too far, I can imagine a lot of listeners saying, “what? Who cares about a bunch of video games buried in the desert for decades?”

Obviously, a lot people seem to care, but could you explain why?

Gwen Howerton: Yeah, I think what I find so interesting about this story, it’s one of those urban legends that a lot of the time things like this don’t turn out to be true. Usually it’s like, no, we threw a lot these games in the trash or whatever.

But no, it turned out to be true. Atari did, in fact, bury hundreds of thousands of copies of “E.T.,” which if you’re of a certain age, people remember this game. And so I think, for me, what’s kind of interesting is one of those rare urban legends that yeah, it mostly turned out to be true.

Why would they go to the trouble? Why wouldn’t they just throw it out with the rest of the trash?

Yeah, and I think it’s one of those things where, you know, before, I think now we look at this as kind of ridiculous, right? Like why would you go to the trouble of that?

But it was a different time. Like the company had just put out this game ahead of the 1982 holiday season. The idea was that it was going to bring in a bunch of money. People were going to go out and buy this game in droves just as they had gone and seen “E.T.” in droves.

But of course, this kind of came at the backdrop of economic downturn in the games industry, not just with Atari, which was losing money around this time, but the market was completely saturated with console company. You know, every company was putting out their version of the Atari to try to compete and personal computers were catching on at the time.

And so, you know, they suddenly had all these people who weren’t interested in buying this game that reviews had said were not great. Distributors were suddenly not going to buy as many copies as they had anticipated, and they had to do something with them.

And what I found so interesting about this story, too, and we can get into this in a second, is kind of the Texas backdrop of it is that all these copies were filling up this flailing factory in El Paso and they had to do something with them and that something was throw them away.

And to this day, we don’t really know why specifically a landfill, but it seems to me that that was their last resort of, “well, nobody’s gonna buy these games and they’re not particularly good, so destroy them.”

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“Destroy them” all right. But back up for a minute. You touched on a warehouse in El Paso. Here’s our “Texas nexus,” as we like to say around these parts. What were these games doing in a warehouse in El Paso?

That’s why I wrote about this, because one of the things I like to do is try to find a Texas connection to things. And so what I didn’t know is that, starting in the ’70s, this Atari El Paso factory was one of the biggest manufacturing plants for Atari games and consoles outside of Atari’s main headquarters in California.

It was a big job creator in El Paso. They had good-paying jobs manufacturing cartridges and game consoles. But as went the games industry in the ’80s up to the 1983 video games crash, there were layoffs at this plant.

And so, yeah, faced with these thousands and thousands of game cartridges taking up in this warehouse that nobody was going to buy, they sent the foreman and they said, “take 20-something trucks and take them across the border to Alamogordo and bury them there.”

And so it’s kind of a microcosm locally. It’s crazy to me. And I never heard of that Texas connection before.

Let’s talk about “E.T.” in particular. How did that game get so closely tied to – and, really, specifically blamed for – Atari’s downfall? What was it?

Did Atari just fail to execute here or they didn’t read changing game-player habits or was it something about E.T. that people kind of gotten saturated with it?

Yeah, and it’s funny enough because “E.T.” is the game that everybody remembers, and it kind of is the most notorious game that when they dug up all these games in 2014, they found the most copies of “E.T.” But it was actually a pretty good mix of other games.

At the time, this is not as well-known, but Atari had also secured the rights to “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” another Spielberg movie, and they were kind of banking the hopes that like that box office success of that movie would translate to game sales and that people would want to buy a game based off of the movie.

But you know, one of the things with “E.T.” specifically is I believe they got the licensing agreement done in July of that year. And then the developer, a very famous developer for Atari – his name is Howard Scott Warshaw – he was given five weeks to design the “E.T.” game so they could get it out for the holiday shopping season.

And you know, there just was not enough time to really make a game that was faithful to the movie. I mean, people say that it’s really hard. You know, the graphics were not cutting-edge. Like it was confusing. It was hard.

I think the fact that it was really bad and that they way overestimated how much people would want to play this game, I think really led to it kind of became a symbol of the thing that really brought Atari down from being at the top of the games industry to just totally spiraling, losing money.

Gwen, were you able to figure out why it is that this company that maintained the El Paso warehouse, why they wouldn’t just bury them in their own backyard? Was there a reason why they would have to ship them across state lines to bury them in a New Mexico landfill?

Yes. And of course, the foreman, his name is Jim Heller. At that plant, he’s given a lot of interviews over the years.

He said that while there was no specific reason given for New Mexico, one reason I’ve seen cited is that New Mexico had stronger laws against scavenging landfills and waste dumps than Texas did at the time. The idea being that they didn’t want kids going in and taking all of these brand new Atari games.

And also I would just assume that it was somewhere where it was going to be hard to find, I guess, was the idea. Like if you knew where this El Paso factory was and you heard that they were burying a bunch of games, it would probably stand to reason that it would be buried around there.

So I imagine they thought that they would have a little bit more flexibility and be able to hide it a little better if they drove it across state lines. Obviously that didn’t work, but those were two reasons that jumped out to me.

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