Verdict: Partially True · 1980s
The legend that Atari buried millions of unsold E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill was considered an urban myth for decades until a 2014 excavation confirmed that cartridges were indeed buried there — though the scale was far smaller than legend claimed.
Following the catastrophic commercial failure of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 and the broader collapse of Atari's market position in 1983, the company was left with millions of unsold and returned cartridges across its product line. The legend claimed that Atari crushed and buried these cartridges — including millions of E.T. units — in a Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill. The story circulated as rumor for thirty years, treated skeptically by most gaming historians who considered it too symbolically perfect to be true. In April 2014, a documentary film crew partnered with the city of Alamogordo to excavate the site. They found approximately 1,300 cartridges including confirmed E.T. units — far fewer than the millions the legend claimed, and representing a range of Atari titles rather than just E.T., but definitively confirming that the burial happened. The legend was true; the scale was mythologized.
The 2014 Alamogordo excavation, documented in Zak Penn's "Atari: Game Over," found a mixture of Atari cartridges rather than a landfill exclusively filled with E.T. units. Titles recovered included Centipede, Missile Command, and other Atari titles alongside E.T. cartridges, suggesting that the burial represented a general disposal of unsold inventory rather than a targeted burial of a single failed product.
The cartridge count — approximately 1,300 recovered from a relatively small dig site — is far below the millions the legend claimed. Historians believe that Atari's unsold inventory was disposed of through multiple methods at multiple sites, and that the Alamogordo burial represented one facility's contribution to a larger disposal effort rather than the singular event the legend described.
The excavation both confirmed and complicated the legend simultaneously: the burial was real, E.T. cartridges were there, but the mythologized scale was accurate only in the most generous interpretation. The truth was messier and more mundane than thirty years of legend had suggested.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 is frequently cited as a cause of the 1983 video game crash, though gaming historians generally view this as an oversimplification. The game was genuinely poorly received — designed in approximately five weeks to meet a Christmas deadline, it featured confusing gameplay that even contemporary players found impenetrable — but the crash had structural causes that preceded E.T.'s release.
The burial legend became so culturally resonant precisely because E.T. was an easy symbol for everything that went wrong in the early gaming industry: rushed development, misaligned expectations, corporate overconfidence, and catastrophic market miscalculation. Whether or not millions of cartridges were actually buried, the legend captured a real economic and cultural truth about Atari's collapse, which is perhaps why it persisted so stubbornly for three decades before being partially vindicated by archaeology.