In reading Landfill Legend for tomorrow’s class, I felt as though the way in which the author described the Atari video game and its general commercial demise mirrors that of an actual human life. The author speaks about three phases of the game’s life: pre-existence, commercial existence, and disposal and memorialization. There is talk about the conception and discussion of the game before it came to fruition, much like people discuss and then conceive a human baby. The author also discusses the “life” of the game, during which its value and purpose derive from the ability to generate profit. As soon as that ability is stripped, or in this case was never realized, the “life” of the game is ended and then needs to be dealt with.
It is at this point when the comparison of the video game to a human life is most apparent. In describing the role of the landfill in which the video games were deposited, the author calls it a “nondescript marker: a final resting place that propels us backward to learn more about why products were buried, and how they continue to reach beyond the grave and fascinate us decades after” (Guins, 209). This is much like the function of a grave, from which a haunted spirit “emerges” to remind us of past events and or human mistakes made throughout history. Just as a “writer, musician, actor, or porn star, E.T’s fame lives on long after its demise” due to the “memorialization of its burial” (Guins, 210). In this way, the author directly likens the burial of a video game in the landfill to the surviving legacy of a human public figure, as “its afterlife status as memorialized object, particularly that the legend refuses to lie dormant” has survived similarly to how the legacy of a prematurely-ended human life might have been. It is almost as if, given the way the game was hastily generated and rapidly devalued during its time on the market, the essence or spirit of Atari’s ET will not let us forget how the potential of the game was precluded by human haste and greed for profit.