Quietly Gone — Ep 8: The Cartridges Under the Desert
It's just after midnight. September 26, 1983.
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Quietly Gone — Ep 8: The Cartridges Under the Desert
On September 26, 1983, a fleet of dump trucks arrived at a municipal landfill on the eastern edge of Alamogordo, New Mexico, sometime before sunrise. They unloaded crates of Atari video game cartridges — millions of them — which were crushed under a bulldozer and buried in a hole sealed with a concrete slab. The whole operation was over by morning. For thirty years, it passed into gaming folklore: the story people repeated at conventions that nobody quite believed. In 2014, a documentary crew excavated the site and confirmed it was all true.
This episode follows the full arc — from Atari's extraordinary rise in the late 1970s and the 36-day sprint to build an E.T. game for Christmas 1982, through the overconfident twelve-million-unit production run, the market collapse that wiped out ninety-seven percent of video game industry revenue by 1985, and the decision to quietly truck the evidence into the desert. It ends where the story is still unresolved: most of the cartridges were never dug up. They're still there, somewhere under the Alamogordo landfill, in the high New Mexico desert, under the enormous sky.
Sources
- Atari: Game Over (2014 documentary) — Microsoft / Xbox Entertainment Studios
- 「The Great Video Game Crash of 1983」— Smithsonian Magazine
- Howard Scott Warshaw interview — Retro Gamer / various gaming press archives
- Alamogordo excavation, April 2014 — Associated Press coverage
- New Mexico Museum of Space History — Atari collection
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