Atari Dump Site (Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA)

No description specified.

Site Name Keywords
Atari Dump Site

Site Type Keywords
Archaeological Feature • Midden • Trash Midden

Other Keywords
game cartridge • Atari 2600 • Atari 5200 • game instruction manual • Atari comic book • blister pack • boxed retail games • Atari controller

Culture Keywords
Modern

Investigation Types
Data Recovery / Excavation

Material Types
Game Media • Hardware • Printed Material

Geographic Keywords
New Mexico (State / Territory) • Otero County (County) • United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • USA (Country) • Alamogordo City Landfill

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-4 of 4)

  • Atari Dump Site (Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA)
    PROJECT Andrew Reinhard. Joe Lewandowski. Zak Penn.

    Atari, Inc. dumped ca. 800,000 video game cartridges into a specially dug cell in the Alamogordo, NM city landfill in September 1983. This action, even though it was reported in the New York Times and Alamogordo Daily News, became an urban legend stating that Atari dumped its unpopular E.T. games, rumored to be the "worst video game ever made." On April 26, 2014, the City of Alamogordo in cooperation with archaeologists and a documentary film crew, excavated the cell and recovered just over...

  • Atari eBay Auctions (2016)
    DATASET Mark Flaa.

    Alamogordo ran eBay auctions on 44 separate days between November 13, 2014, and August 4, 2015, each day’s listings consisting of 1–96 individual lots. Each of the auctioned games came with a metal City of Alamogordo property tag and ID number as well as a certificate of authenticity signed by the mayor, Susie Galea, and by Howard Scott Warshaw, Atari wunderkind developer and creator of the E.T. game. Despite the variable conditions of the artifacts, the games served (and still serve) as a...

  • Manifest of Excavated Atari Games (2014)
    DATASET Joe Lewandowski.

    The table contains two headers. The lower header separates the games into either “box” (a boxed cartridge) or “cart” (a loose cartridge). There is no indication of whether boxed cartridges were either blister-packed or part of a carton of six games. The upper header lists the total number of games first, and then subdivides those into games given to Lightbox Entertainment (as per their agreement with Alamogordo), games sold by the city on eBay (see the related eBay file in this tDAR collection),...

  • Pre-Excavation Plans and Sketches, 1983 and 2014 (2014)
    DOCUMENT Full-Text Joe Lewandowski.

    This pre-excavation file contains the following, created/assembled by Joe Lewandowski, Tularosa Basin Historical Society: 1. 1983 color photo of the Atari deposit hand-marked in 2014 with presumed stratigraphic layers. 2. 2014 color sketch of the possible stratigraphy of the landfill cell containing the Atari deposit. 3. 1983 color photo of cement slurry being poured over the Atari deposit. 4. 1983 b/w photo of the Atari deposit. 5. 2014 satellite image from Google Earth of the Alamogordo...