On Saturday, a film crew looked on as workmen dug up copies of failed Atari game, ET. But why does everyone care so much?

The tweets started coming in on Saturday morning. Larry Hryb, Microsoft's Xbox spokesman in the US, sent out a simple message to his 675,000 followers: "We found 'em!".



Then the photos quickly followed (because the internet is always hungry for photographic proof); old video game boxes, withered and torn, depicting the familiar image of ET and Elliot looking out at the distant horizon.

And suddenly, it was all true. In 1983, the video game company Atari really did send truck-loads of unsold video games into the New Mexico desert to be buried in a landfill site. A piece of gaming mythology had become an instance of archeological fact. And of course, there was a film crew there, organising the whole thing for a documentary to be shown exclusively on Xbox. Because this is how the industry works now – literally excavating the past for saleable content.

Why the mythology?

Why is this important – or at least interesting? The thing is, the proof of Atari's desperate action has been there all along. The New York Times ran a story on the disposal of unsold ET game cartridges in 1983 which gives the location of the landfill, Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the number of trucks involved: 14. "Atari lost $310.5m in the second quarter," the story concludes drily. "Largely because of a sharp drop in video game sales."

So why the mythology? Partly, it's about how early video-game history was not particularly well recorded and how the internet arose to turn rumour into fact – and vice versa. In 1983, not many gamers around the world had access to the New York Times, and for many years, stories about the ET game – a very poor movie adaptation rushed on to the shelves in December 1982 to cash in on the huge success of Steven Spielberg's hit movie – circulated as speculation.

No one outside of games really cared about a few thousand copies of an awful game; video games were still kids' stuff back then, and the gaming press was in its infancy, much more concerned with the latest titles than the medium's nascent history. The arrival of the world wide web allowed intrigue and speculation to go wild, but the facts were still not widely available; and into this space a mythology grew.

'Not knowing something makes it a myth'

"'Urban legend' is now anything you didn't already read on the internet," said game designer, author and academic Ian Bogost to Ars Technica at the weekend. "This isn’t just a games thing. Anything one hasn’t personally read online or can find in a Top 20 Google results becomes obscured to the point of legend… People seem to think not knowing something makes it a myth… because they only heard about it as presented as legend, rather than in historical context."

And ET isn't just any cartridge. It is based on a wonderful movie that will be dearly rememebered by many veteran gamers – there is a real nostalgic power there. Plus, the failure of ET has come become a symbol for the collapse of Atari, the defining video game company that in effect invented the industry in the early 70s, then flooded the market with so many mediocre titles it almost destroyed it again. The ET landfill site is, then, symbolic, the battered cartridges a representation of sacrifice.

Or perhaps these cartridges are abiding symbols of gigantic hubris. "It’s as much about the shattered dreams of a company like Atari," said Jonathan Chinn of Lightbox Entertainment, the production company making the excavation documentary, at the SXSW festival this year. "To all intents and purposes, [Atari] should really be Apple today… the notion that a company like that failed, I think, is worth exploring.”

Really, though, this is about the human need to create mythologies around our lives and interests. Every nation, every artform, every pursuit is rich in folklore – somehow we need to feel the weight of eternity in everything we do. The video game industry has only been around since the early 70s – that's the equivalent of progressing from the earliest written languages to the Kindle in 40 years. There shouldn't be any uncertainty at all, this is an era of mass information – so gamers have inserted their own culture of doubt. Even now, there are people on the gaming forum NeoGaf who insist this whole thing is fake. Mankind cannot bear too much reality – especially when conspiracy is much more fun.



Digging up legends



Drill down to the facts, and they are not as compelling. ET didn't destroy Atari; it certainly helped, but then, so did other poor conversions such as the 2600 version of Pac-Man, and the surfeit of awful third-party titles. Then there was the failure of the Atari 5200 console and the irresistible rise of Nintendo. And ET certainly wasn't the worst game of all time, either – it wasn't even the worst game on the Atari 2600.

But people don't take film crews into the New Mexico desert with Microsoft spokespeople in tow to dig up facts; they go to dig up legends, and that is exactly what they have. From those battered boxes, some of them still shrinkwrapped, the documentary makers have produced a genuine physical spectacle for the digital age. All that matters are those photos, the workmen holding the cartridges aloft like relics, triumphing over the past for an audience of idle internet surfers, searching for authenticity among the buzzfeeds and promoted tweets.

The video game industry is in its infancy, but just like the birth of the movie industry, it has had to cope with marginalisation and condescension. Nobody thought it was worth preserving this history. Now we have video game exhibitions in Moma and the Barbican, and genuine attempts to catalogue and save old games and game formats at academic institutions around the world.



Nobody outside of gaming cared about games for 30 years; now a bunch of cartridges clawed from a dusty grave in the New Mexico desert garners worldwide attention. Nostalgia gives meaning to everything in the end.

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