Thousands of cartridges buried in the desert: between urban legend and historical symbol

Atari: From hero to zero

If video games are the largest cultural industry in France today, but also in many countries, they have come a long way. To understand this, one has to take a small step back. 1972 Pong was released, developed by the very young American company Atari. The game knows commercial win which the company will establish as the mainstay of the industry. A position that Atari will maintain a little more with Asteroids in 1979, in the golden age of arcade games. It is hard to imagine today that Atari could have taken this place, and yet the American company positions itself in a world where Philips, Magnavox and many others are racing for the best console far ahead with his Atari 2600. The most successful console of its generation will survive at least 25 million copies. So in 1982 the company represented no less than 80% of the video game market. For the little anecdote, it is also the former Atari who founded the first third-party developer in 1979 (who produced games on various consoles and not just his): Activation, a name that is much more meaningful today.

Forty years later and after many setbacks Atari has become a small player in the industry. The company is struggling to renew itself, struggling to find a place for itself in this more progressive world, and has also tried to get back to the top of the stage by settling for it Take advantage of its former glory with the Atari VCS.

This new console, which was released on December 14, 2020 (almost 25 years after the end of production of the Jaguar, Atari’s last console), is optically based on the Atari 2600 and is also a next-generation console. But it’s pale to the PS5 and other Xbox series, and if we can’t say it flopped, it doesn’t stand out as a staple of this generation either.

But what could have happened then, that such an actor was placed in such a low rank? Well, you should know that if Atari was instrumental in influencing video games, so was Atari one of the sources of its downfall. And the company was producing for good reason 1982 “worst video game in history” (which we talked about recently in another article): ET the alien. Sum up, Atari’s ambitions are far too big for a game full of bugs that sells well but is not enough to sell the four million units produced. As a result, the company, which is forced to reimburse to resellers and suffer from a damaged image, suffers colossal losses. Atari recorded this in 1983 Loss of $ 536 million. The company will never really be able to recover from this. This ongoing bankruptcy is part of a dramatic trend that will affect the entire industry. A trend so pronounced that many thought back then that the video game industry was coming to an end hence the name of 1983 video game crash, the remains of which were in a landfill in Alamogordo.

Unloading a weight

After the failure of ET (but also Pac-Man for Atari 2600 and some others), So Atari ends with no less than 10 million unsold and unsaleable cartridges. Although these excess units have already cost the company a great deal, they continue to weigh on its finances. As a matter of fact, Who says high inventory, says to pay tax levies. To benefit from tax breaks and thus limit the damage caused by a little less loss of money, there is only one solution: get rid of those unwanted stocks.

Therefore, in September 1983, About fifteen semi-trailers get lost in a town of nearly 25,000 in the heart of New Mexico: Alamogordo. On behalf of Atari, they come in turn to dispose of their mysterious contents in a very banal landfill. So why so far from his native California to come and just throw away his trash? It’s one of the company’s representatives polled by the New York Times who will provide part of the answer: the Atari factory in El Paso, is 145 km south of Alamogordo, is being converted into a recycling center and must therefore get rid of lots of stocks. But despite the many articles, it is impossible to know what Atari buried under the arid land of Alamogordo. And for good reason, there’s another very special reason that got Atari to take a closer look at this discharge: it’s very convenient to get rid of things the nature of which nobody should know. In defense of Alamogordo he is forbidden to search rubbish

and so that doesn’t happen the latter are buried every night.

Nobody will find out what Atari buried there? Well, not really, because that would underestimate the curiosity and insight of some. Rumor has it that what is hiding in the landfill is nothing more than the millions of unsold cartridges fromET The local children are fast on their way and see for themselves. According to the Knight Ridder news agency, they are indeed with game cartridges (also included Hunter of the lost treasure or Berzerk) that they left. The news spreads and more and more of them dare to unearth this mysterious treasure. So Atari asks that a concrete slab be poured to cover his remains.

The flood of rubbish and the associated excitement caused the residents to protests and Ask Atari to stop burying him repeatedly. The company had no choice but to give in to their demand, and the Alamogordo landfill became a distant memory. So distant that little by little the various stories are forgotten or questioned. We start to doubt that Atari may have purposely destroyed games. If we keep talking about this landfill, most of the time it is some kind of urban legend, fully assembled to serve as an allegory, a symbol of an oversized industry that will end up burning its wings. It is therefore not surprising that it is repeated several times in popular culture. The script of the film Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie

(Directed by the Youtuber of the same name), for example, revolves around this whole story of cartridge burial, like the clip for the song When I wake up, from the little known group Wintergreen. So this urban legend will last before it becomes a reality thirty years later.

game over

it is April 26, 2014 that this whole story comes out again. To The tightrope walker for one and 30 days on the other hand, Simon and Jonathan Chinn, directors of the production company Lightbox, approach Fuel Industries with a very specific idea: Come back to this story and separate the true from the false. Above all, they rely on one thing that is easy for them to get: Permission to excavate the famous landfill. So it is under the dome of Xbox Entertainment Studios that Zak Penn, Director chosen to produce a documentary finds himself in the Alamogordo countryside, camera in hand, while workers dig into the landfill. By his side, Howard Scott Warshaw, Game developer ET, visited the scene as well James Heller, Ataris then head of the landfill. After a few hours the verdict is made: the first cartridge remains come out of the ground. So the story was true!

Nonetheless, yesterday’s words have part of the legend. It is not millions of cartridges that lie under the floor of the landfill, but according to Heller only 728,000. And for which copies ofET, it only counts for 10% of the total games unearthed. Between two centipede, Pac-Man Where Mrs. Pac-Man, turns out to be “the worst video game in history” just one mistake among many. If it symbolizes this past period of crisis well, ET and its failure cannot be the only cause of the downfall of Atari and the industry. It was only the game too much set up an industry plagued by overproduction and thoughtlessness. This gradual fall will be revealed to viewers on the Xbox Video service starting November 20, 2014, the release date of the documentary that put an end to longstanding legends and assumptions: Atari: Game Over.

Unfortunately, this documentary lives up to its name, as American society will never really rise from its ashes. But this story still has a happy ending. In May 2014, the city’s mayor came up with the idea to auction these cartridges and a little over a year later they raised $ 107,930.15. Most of this has been donated to the city of Alamogordo so that it can thrive and develop tourism around this great stage in the history of video games. So it’s funny to see the value these cartridges gained, however they were sold back then. A monetary value certainly, but also symbolically, historically. For this reason, the Smithsonian Institution (scientific research institute) made a point of getting one of the buried cartridges from. to recoverETwhat also symbolizes “The constant challenge of making a good adaptation from film to video game, the demise of Atari, the end of an era in video game making, and the life cycle of a video game cartridge. “ Not bad for what we call “the worst video game in history”.