Still Crummy After All These Years, Cache of Buried Atari Games Located and Unearthed

Microsoft teasing the rediscovery.

As promised last year, the legendary burial site (landfill) of unsold Atari back stock has been located and deemed a fulfillment of the legend. The Atari 2600's game industry crashing flood of bloatware has long been symbolized by the game 'E.T.' and of course copies of E.T. have been a big part of the unearthing.

It turns out that the dry desert is the perfect place to store Atari 2600 cartridges and boxes, at least until some crazed documentaries come to collect.

From Microsoft, "A team of filmmakers and excavators descended upon the Alamogordo Landfill in New Mexico today, to investigate the longstanding legend of Atari's long-buried cache of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" cartridges. As the story goes, the reviled Atari 2600 movie tie-in game went largely unwanted by consumers, and Atari -- facing financial catastrophe due to the very costly flop -- decided to rid themselves of thousands upon thousands of these unsold cartridges, dumping them in the New Mexico landfill and leaving them buried forever. Fuel Entertainment took an interest in the legend, and in December 2013, with help from local garbage contractor Joe Lewandowski, acquired the exclusive rights to excavate the Alamogordo landfill. Fuel Entertainment then brought the opportunity to Xbox Entertainment Studios."

"Today's excavators went to Alamogordo hoping to provide closure to this legend, perhaps make history and get some awesome documentary footage for the upcoming original film by Xbox, "Atari: Game Over" (working title)."

"And, lo and behold, they hit paydirt. The findings started out very promising, with an old, dusty Atari 2600 joystick buried in the landfill. Then an "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" cartridge. A box. An instruction manual. And the confirmation of "a lot more down there." How many more, we don't know just yet -- but at this point, we can safely report that those long-buried cartridges are actually, 100 percent there. Crazy, isn't it!? And it sounds like some other games are down there, too: Centipede, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and possibly more. "Lots of boxes" is what we're hearing."

Source: Xbox Wire