Witness Video Game History, Microsoft Commissions a Plan to Dig Up the E.T. Landfill

et new mexico 04-12-14-1

If you’re well versed in the fabled lore of the video game industry crash of 1977, you’ve probably heard of an infamously bad turd called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a video game adaptation of the movie that came out the same year. If you’re too young to know about any of this, or you simply just didn’t care enough to read about it until now, let ol’ Papa Orselli retell the terrifying tale of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the game.

While the movie is easily one of Spielberg’s best and a film that furthered his career extensively, the game was so bad that kids would rather trade dead spiders than play it on the Atari 2600. As the makers of the game expected it to sell gangbusters and do well just like the movie did, they made a ton of copies that clearly didn’t sell – so what did they do with them? Since this game came out in the midst of the video game crash of the late 70’s and early 80’s, they probably couldn’t have sold the damn things regardless of its quality as kids, parents, and investors alike had given up on the industry.


So they took millions of copies – literally millions of Atari 2600 cartridges, and buried them at an undisclosed location in a landfill in New Mexico. Three decades later, after rumors of its real location and many failed attempts by wily fans to go and find it themselves, Microsoft has stepped up to the plate after they finally secured the rights to literally dig up the landfill. Not only are they going to lead an excavation of the cartridges, they’re going to record it for a documentary that will be part of the original content produced by the new Xbox Entertainment Studios.

The excavation itself will be open to the public, and it will be produced by Fuel Entertainment, the actual company who got the permits and such to legally do the dig. The director of the documentary will be Zak Penn, a writer whose work can be seen in The Avengers and X-Men 2. If you want to get in on the action, the dig itself will take place from 11:30 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. in Alamogordo, New Mexico, at the Alamogordo Landfill.

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