Atari was left with so many copies it couldn't sell that it secretly buried them to hide its shame. would be such a colossal hit movie that everyone would rush out to buy the game. At the time, Warshaw didn't believe the burial had even happened.īy that time, the story had become a cautionary fable: Atari, at the height of its popularity, believed it could do no wrong. I had last seen Warshaw at a Classic Gaming Expo about a decade ago, before much of the definitive info about the Atari burial had come to light. It's a miracle he finished a game at all. Warshaw was given just five weeks to have the game ready for Christmas. It was a hit, which prompted Spielberg to personally choose him for E.T. Yars' Revenge brought him an invitation to translate Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark to Atari. Yes, he made E.T., but he also made Yars' Revenge, considered among the best Atari games ever. He is generally recognized as having been unfairly maligned for the game. Howard Scott Warshaw, the Atari game designer who created E.T., arrived shortly thereafter. The plan was to stop digging just short of where Lewandowski figured the games would be, and save the big moment for a public unearthing the next day. Lewandowski's wife Deb kept close watch to make sure spectators and journalists didn't wander into the excavation site and get killed. They hauled it to another landfill some 20 miles away, because this one is no longer active. Dump trucks pulled up one by one, each quickly filled with 10 tons or more of dirt and debris. With that, the Caterpillar operator lowered his backhoe bucket and scooped up a great heap of red earth.Īnd so began a carefully choreographed sequence that proceeded far more quickly than I ever would have imagined. The games, he said, were 20 feet down, beneath the refuse thrown into the trench on that day in 1983. Many governmental agencies had to sign off on the excavation, he said, and he couldn't "turn the dump into Swiss cheese." He was reasonably sure this was the place. "This is the first hole, and the only hole," he said of the dig. He grabbed a few games, like everyone else, and left wondering why Atari would throw away brand new merchandise. How that came to be is a convoluted tale-suffice to say the garbage war of the early 1980s between Alamogordo's competing waste management companies was scintillating-but when pallets of new videogames were being buried, Lewandowski went to see the spectacle for himself. Joe Lewandowski led the dig, in no small part because he saw the games being buried all those years ago.
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