In 1982, Atari dumped what was dubbed by numerous video game critics as the “worst game ever made” into a landfill in a nondescript New Mexico town. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial sales bombed. So, it was loaded into trucks and driven off to be crushed, buried and forgotten about.
Years later, conspiracy theories, curiosity, academic research and even a Canadian entertainment company bent on uncovering Atari’s trash swirl around this dumping story.
Why? By all accounts, it was terrible game. No one seemed to enjoy playing it; consumers returned the game en masse and retailers slashed the prices, unable to sell more. It was developed in only five weeks. It lacked interesting game-play and had awful graphics. Raiford Guins wrote that the little alien looked “too haggard” for comfort. (217). It seems like most of the play experience involved falling into pits over and over again.
It again begs the question — why is there all this fanfare for such a terrible game?
Typically, Guins points out, the dumping process is not publicized or even in public view. It hurts to see the objects we imbue with so much social power — objects that become fetishistic representations of self, social relationships and all kinds of other abstract human concepts — become trash. The symbols we attached are shed and all that’s left is a physical, material shell. The magic is lost and the use value comes too sharply into focus — we have to look away.
It’s perhaps why dumping grounds can elicit anxiety, sadness, and dread. Perhaps it’s also why the US exports up to 40% of our e-waste overseas. It’s easier to bear if it’s out of sight. Trash reveals the “doleful truthfulness” of objects; we are literally driven to a state of mourning when confronted with objects severed from their fetishistic dimensions. (Guins, 227).
Atari’s E.T. game was trash, technically — was was crushed by bulldozers and packed beneath the ground with dirt. However, something interesting happened: it wasn’t forgotten and it hasn’t seemed to take on the “doleful” characteristic of other trash.
The process of secrecy and new-found rarity drew people’s attention and maintained interest the game. The cartridge may have lost its status as a usable game with desirable gameplay, but it gained status as a concrete emblem of video game history. It fits neatly into the myth of Atari by providing a physical representation. The game itself may be buried in the ground, but mystery, rarity, and its capacity to concretize history all prevent it from decomposing as trash. E.T. may have been dead and buried in the 1980s, but today it is still alive and well in the social mind.
Works Cited:
Guins, Raiford. “Landfill Legend.” Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2014. 207-35.
Guins’ book was published just a tad too soon…A few months later and he would’ve been able to incorporate the recovered E.T. cartridges into the story! I wonder what the general reaction has been to discovering that the Atari landfill story was not urban legend. In some ways it feels like the story has been diminished somewhat, like discovering Bigfoot does exist. The buried cartridges were able to play a bigger role in our cultural memory precisely because of their uncanny absence. Or at least, that’s my theory…