Atari dump excavation gets city approval

The famous Atari dump in New Mexico where the company is believed to have buried hundreds of tons of equipment, games and merchandise is set to be excavated.

As reported by local news site Alamogordonews, film company Fuel Industries has been given permission by Alamogordo to dig up the landfill site which has remained buried since 1983.

The company has six months to excavate the land.

It is believe the site is home to a number of old Atari consoles and thousands of copies of one of the company’s biggest failures, E.T.

After spending extravagant amounts of money acquiring the game rights to the IP from the famous Steven Spielberg film, the company rushed the game to market, at which point it was ridiculed by critics and failed to sell anywhere near sales projections. The game’s release nearly single-handedly destroyed the company.

As spotted by the Westerndigs blog, a report from September 1983 claimed that Atari had indeed dumped 14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and computer equipment at a city landfill. Concrete was then poured over the site.

Fuel Industries plans to film a documentary about the excavation, in which it likely hopes to uncover the buried E.T. cartridges of game industry legend.