“A planned excavation of an old Alamogordo landfill to search for what has been called the worst video game ever has cleared a hurdle with the New Mexico Environmental Department,” John Bear reports for the Alamogordo Daily News.
“According to a letter from the NMED Environmental Protection Division Solid Waste Bureau, the NMED has approved a waste excavation plan for the project with some conditions,” Bear reports. “Three companies, Fuel Entertainment, Xbox Entertainment Studios and LightBox Entertainment plan on digging up portions of an old Alamogordo landfill located near First Street and White Sands Boulevard to search for Atari ‘E.T. The Extraterrestrial’ game cartridges purportedly buried there in the 1980s… A spokesman from Microsoft; who is producing the dig with Lightbox Entertainment — said his company is ‘finalizing plans as we speak.'”
Read more in the full article here.
“Atari paid director Steven Spielberg tens of millions of dollars to license the wildly popular 1982 movie’s name, and game developers completed the project in just six weeks,” Fox News reports. “In the game, the player takes on the role of the titular alien and tries to elude FBI agents while collecting pieces of a telephone to call E.T.’s spaceship.”
“The end result was a huge commercial dud that caused the troubled company’s worth to sink even further,” Fox News reports. “Atari purportedly disposed of millions of game cartridges and other equipment by the truckload at the landfill. The area’s supposed role as a gaming burial ground has taken on urban-legend status over the years.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: We assume it’s for environmental reasons that they’re digging up these old 2600 cartridges, although neither article really explains the “why” very well.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]
Sounds like an incredible waste of time.
Microsoft is looking for something that stinks more than Windows 8.
I think they are on the right track.
Sounds like a really bad easter egg in a new video game.
Is this story a week late?
Pac Man and ET for the 2600 killed my childhood. First time I remember feeling the emotion of “cynicism”
Yes… PAC-man was horrid. !
I can just give them mine. I haven’t played that since ’84
Anyone see anything that explains WHY they are going to all this trouble to dig up the world’s worst video game?
Yeah why?
If they want a copy they can find one for much less.. Wait it’s MS, never mind.
It says in the comments section of the article that Microsoft is making a documentary post on Xbox live
They want to make some room for windows vista and windows Me boxes.
Perhaps they want to phone home.
Were they hoping to dig up some space aliens from the Alamogordo landfill site as well?
This sounds like a late April Fool’s joke
Perhaps they want the space to bury Surface and Windows 8?
I would assume the copper on the connector might be valuable at that scale?
“Mooo-ooom, that hobo’s digging through our garbage again.” “Go get the hose, honey.”
Hmm, maybe they can unearth more un-PC CUSTER’S LAST REVENGE game cartridges too.
Better hope they don’t stumble upon the million or so RROD’d/channel stuffer 360s. That’d be embarrassing.
Microsoft R & D at work, digging in landfills.
They need to make room to bury tens of thousands of unsold Zunes and Surface tablets
Don’t you guys realize how monumental this search is for Microsoft?
That ET game was the base code for Windows! Highly sentimental for them.
Ok ok let us go back into time…
“All your game cartridges are belong to us”
What I read was that the diggers want to scrape the precious metals from the circuitry and connectors. Since the rumored burial entails tens of millions of disposed cartridges, that could yield a substantial bounty of metals and other recyclable materials that can be resold.
I played that game. I built than phone. Ahhhh memories. But it was a lame game, nothing like Raiders of the Lost Ark which was also an 1982 release.
Atari supposedly made more ET game cartridges than the number of 2600 game consoles in existence at that time. I guess they assumed that every 2600 owner would buy the ET game, and console sales would continue to grow.
Each cartridge supposedly weighs 1.6 oz, so just 10 million units will weigh 500 tons. And that doesn’t include the cardboard packaging that supposedly got buried with the game cartridges. So, it’s basically a treasure hunt for several hundred tons of recyclable materials. Given all the players involved, I’m sure the dig will be well publicized with a documentary crew in tow.
Find ET . . . cartridges.
Sounds like a Windows Phone game to me.
Digging up decades-old game cartridges from an Alamogordo landfill?
Sounds like the opening scene for the sequel to My Science Project.
Microsoft have some great tech in their r&d, but Morons don’t know what to do with it, ditto for Google. THATS WHY YOU NEED A VISIONARY AT THE TOP NOT CEOs DEFT AT READING EXCEL SHEETS!!!!
I beat that game numerous times as a child. Was able to help E.T. phone home and get rescued before getting captured.