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The Day Atari Buried Seven Hundred Thousand Games in the Desert
Media & entertainment11 min

The Day Atari Buried Seven Hundred Thousand Games in the Desert

In September nineteen eighty-three, Atari hauled truckloads of surplus cartridges and hardware to a New Mexico landfill, giving rise to an urban legend that endured for thirty years until excavators dug them up. This episode unpacks the frantic five-week development of E.T., the corporate pressures that flooded retailers with millions of unplayed games, and how a routine inventory write-off became the ultimate symbol of the video game crash.

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Show notes

Atari gave a single developer just five and a half weeks to build the entire E.T. game.

Retailers returned millions of unsold E.T. copies, triggering Atari's five hundred thirty-six million dollar operating loss.

Atari manufactured twelve million Pac-Man cartridges despite only ten million people owning the console.

North American video game industry revenues plummeted ninety-seven percent between nineteen eighty-three and nineteen eighty-five.

A twenty fourteen excavation proved the Alamogordo landfill disposal was real, sending an excavated cartridge to the Smithsonian.

In this episode
  1. 01Intro1 min
  2. 02The Five-Week Impossible Deadline3 min
  3. 03The Holiday Glut and the December Surprise2 min
  4. 04The True Anatomy of the Nineteen Eighty-Three Crash3 min
  5. 05The Alamogordo Landfill and the Archaeologists2 min
  6. 06Outro1 min
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