On Saturday April 26th, 2014, a group of filmmakers and excavators traveled to the Alamogordo landfill in New Mexico; their goal was to unearth the fabled Atari cache that had been buried over 30 years ago.
The story goes back to 1983: the video game industry was going downhill, and most manufacturers dropped the prices on their games to dirt cheap. But Atari took it a step further by dumping about 14 truckloads of video game cartridges in a landfill in New Mexico. Atari lost a whopping $310.5 million in the second quarter of 1983 due to the massive lack of video game sales.
I remember hearing this tale from my dad back when I was a kid, and I always wondered if it was true or not. Well, thanks to Major Nelson and his team of filmmakers and excavators, I no longer need to wonder. So far the team has unearthed an Atari 2600 Joystick, Centipede, Space Invaders, and the fabled E.T game.
The working title of the documentary is called Atari: Game Over, the movie will air exclusively on Xbox 360 and Xbox One sometime this year.
To read the full story of the exhuming visit Xbox.com
