There’s something oddly poetic about standing outside a chain-link fence in the New Mexico desert, squinting through metal and dust at a slab of concrete that marks one of the most famous failures in tech history. The site was closed by the time we got there, which felt fitting somehow. Atari’s burial ground—sealed, silent, and half-forgotten—didn’t need us to walk its dirt to tell its story. It was already legend.
We stood on the other side like mourners at a gravesite, not of a man, but of a moment. This was the place where the dreams of early digital pioneers were literally bulldozed and buried—where unsold cartridges of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Pac-Man, and a slew of other unwanted relics were dumped and entombed in 1983, victims of a crash that nearly ended video games before they began.
Most of what I know I learned from stories: how Atari, in a frenzy of hubris, rushed the development of E.T. in just five weeks; how millions of unsold games piled up in warehouses and came to symbolize the overreach of an industry chasing gold and striking dirt instead. So they hauled the shame to Alamogordo, crushed it, buried it, and tried to forget.
And for decades, people did forget—until the rumors wouldn’t stay buried. In 2014, a documentary crew led a dig to find out if the legend was true. It was. They unearthed the cartridges, warped and dusty, beneath layers of trash and time. The film (Atari: Game Over) captured the strange poetry of it all: a man who once coded the most mocked game in history watching it get pulled from the earth like an artifact.
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Some of the games were reclaimed, preserved, and even sold—like relics from a digital Pompeii. What was once ridiculed became coveted. E.T. the Video Game found its place not just in landfills, but in museums. In collectors’ cases. In history books.
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And that, I suppose, is how the story ends. The game that helped crash an industry was dug up, dusted off, and reimagined—not as a failure, but as a symbol. Not of what went wrong, but of how far we’ve come. E.T. the game became an icon, not because it was good, but because it mattered.
We took our photos through the fence and got back in the car. It wasn’t the most exciting stop on our trip, but maybe one of the most meaningful. Because buried failures have a way of coming back to life. Sometimes with a shovel. Sometimes with a story.
And sometimes, just by showing up at the fence—even when the place is closed.