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| Date | September 26, 1983 |
|---|---|
| Location | Otero County, New Mexico, U.S. |
| Coordinates | 32°44′21.4″N 105°59′21.7″W / 32.739278°N 105.989361°W |
| Participants | Atari, Inc., City of Alamogordo, New Mexico, U.S. |
The Atari video game burial was a mass burial of unsold video game cartridges, consoles, and computers in a New Mexico landfill site undertaken by the American video game and home computer company Atari, Inc. in 1983. Before 2014, the goods buried were rumored to be unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), one of the largest commercial video game failures and often cited as one of the worst video games ever released, and the 1982 Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which was commercially successful but critically maligned.
Since the burial was first reported, there had been doubts as to its veracity and scope, and it was frequently dismissed as an urban legend. The event became a cultural icon and a reminder of the video game crash of 1983; it was the end result of a disastrous fiscal year which saw Atari, Inc. sold off by its parent company Warner Communications. Though it was believed that millions of copies of E.T. were buried, Atari officials later verified the numbers to be around 700,000 cartridges of various games, including E.T.
In 2014, Fuel Industries, Microsoft, and others worked with the New Mexico government to excavate the site as part of a documentary, Atari: Game Over. On April 26, 2014, the excavation revealed discarded games and hardware. Only a small fraction, about 1,300 cartridges, were recovered, with a portion given for curation and the rest auctioned to raise money for a museum to commemorate the burial.