Atari Landfill

[adamd]

I have always found this story very interesting, and today some great news came about. I guess it may interest a few of you guys too.

For a quick summary, in the 80s during the video game crash, it was rumoured that Atari buried millions of dollars of products (game cartridges, consoles) in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Most of it was rumoured to be ET cartridges, as it was such a bad selling game. It has always been a fairly good topic of discussion in the gaming community, mainly because no-one really knew if it had happened, and the air of mystery surrounding it.

Over the years, people have made small inroads into finding out what happened, finding information from small newspapers from the time, and performing scans of the land to see if anything was there. All that was confirmed was that Atari were there, but nothing more. A documentary team recently got permission to dig the landfill, and started digging earlier today. Already, they have managed to find intact ET and Centipede cartridges, and they think there is a lot more still in the landfill.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/26/5656288/construction-workers-unearth-legendary-cache-of-atari-games-in-new

[Pleb]

That's pretty cool, shame I know nothing about the game since the first game console I had was a SEGA Dreamcast
Or maybe it's a good thing that I know nothing about this awful game...

Also adamd, I just realised that your profile pic is a young Jeremy Clarkson!

[WizzyThaMan]

Ive read it on the news adam. Yes its amazing... but its a rubbish game anyway, plus having a piece of it makes it less valuable now

[adamd]

That's pretty cool, shame I know nothing about the game since the first game console I had was a SEGA Dreamcast
Or maybe it's a good thing that I know nothing about this awful game...

Also adamd, I just realised that your profile pic is a young Jeremy Clarkson!

Hey, the Dreamcast is no bad thing. And yes, I feel like his hair was it's own living being at that time.

Ive read it on the news adam. Yes its amazing... but its a rubbish game anyway, plus having a piece of it makes it less valuable now

That's not the point man, it's that the myth is true. The game is worthless anyway, and largely used for homebrew carts. The game wasn't actually as bad as is made out compared to others of the time, it was just seriously overproduced by Atari and caused them massive losses. It still seems weird they haven't found any Pac-Man carts, as that was the other real bad game credited with contributing largely to the crash.

[WizzyThaMan]

It is assumed that they contributed to the crash (never proven but of course this gutfeeling explains a lot). Yes, its a myth to be solved and it's nice they did. Atari lost so much money on this one they almost went bankrupt. The crash led to almost the end of consoles. I'm glad that they survived it, both Atari and consoles!

[EnryGT5]

Wow, i didn't really think it was true, that's a big surprise