ALAMOGORDO, NM—When a film crew, a dig crew, and dozens of fans and journalists showed up at a decades-old desert landfill in New Mexico on Saturday, no one was certain what to expect. The crowd was hoping to confirm a story that made its way into gaming legend: that Atari dumped thousands, perhaps millions, of E.T. (and perhaps other) cartridges in this particular landfill back in 1983 at the height of the Video Game Crash.

While the excavation crew was digging down into the 1983 layer of the landfill, Ars got a chance to talk to E.T. programmer Howard Scott Warshaw, who was milling about, talking to fans and press. Warshaw famously claimed that the legend of E.T. cartridge burials was fake. Today, he's a licensed psychotherapist in California and says he aims to help people in high-tech circles work through their problems.

Perhaps that big-picture view of the industry is what helps him put the legends of E.T. into perspective. "It would be pretty odd to think that E.T. really was the downfall of the industry and that I, as a programmer, over the course of five weeks, was able to topple a billion-dollar industry. But I also have a degree in economics," Warshaw told Ars yesterday.

Ars also spoke to producer Jonathan Chinn, who will be behind the forthcoming documentary about Atari that will feature scenes from the landfill dig. Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment Studios have been planning the film for about a year now, and the two studios expect to release it sometime later this year.

"At first we were a little bit skeptical, we aren't massive gamers, but as we started to do some research and look into it and talk to people, we quickly realized that this is really a fascinating story and actually an important story for the gaming industry," Chinn told Ars.

Before anything is discovered in the landfill, Ars speaks to Howard Scott Warshaw and Jonathan Chinn.

Then, after approximately three hours of digging in a partially excavated area of the landfill, a few members of the dig crew came out carrying some incredibly well-preserved Atari paraphernalia. The legend was confirmed.

The pit was filled with epic proportions of Atari game cartridges and Atari controllers, and E.T. wasn't the only game in there. One archaeologist who was working in the pit said that there would be no feasible way to estimate just how many cartridges were dumped, since the pit that the crew was allowed to dig was very small compared to the probable size of the trench that Atari dumped games into.

As the wind picked up and the dust got thicker, the crew continued to dig and spread the refuse out so the archaeologists and the film crew could take a look at what was down there. Ars spoke to Joe Lewandowski, a garbage contractor in the Alamogordo area who first saw the abandoned cartridges in 1983.

Four years ago, when Lewandowski started getting calls from NYU professors and the Discovery Channel, he tried to relocate the site of the Atari landfill. Lewandowski quickly became a major resource in pinpointing the most likely place that Fuel and Microsoft's documentarians might find buried Atari cartridges. "I had conversations over the years about it with people, because it would come up," Lewandowski told us at the dig site. "And so you say you're from Alamogordo and you know, they forget about the atomic bomb but they remember Atari."

Ars also talked with archaeologist Andrew Reinhard, who was allowed into the dig area and is part of the team responsible for cataloging and photographing the contents of the landfill site. "We found just loads and loads and loads of Atari games. Not only just Atari games, but you know the E.T. games that were rumored to be there. We found a number of other games like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pele's Soccer, Yar's Revenge, Baseball, Centipede—lots of Centipede, lots of Warlords."

After a treasure trove of games is discovered in a New Mexico landfill, Ars speaks to Joe Lewandowski and Andrew Reinhard.

For now, whatever was rescued from the pit will go to the City of Alamogordo, with Fuel and Microsoft being allotted "250 cartridges or 10 percent of the cartridges found, whichever is greater" for their documentary.

Although the legend has been confirmed, you can be sure that the rumors and the whispers about Atari and its history won't leave the public consciousness. For a look at the real meaning behind this massive myth, check out Ars' "Digging up meaning from the rubble of an excavated Atari landfill."