IN FALL 1983, an industry-wide video game crash left Atari with an entire El Paso warehouse full of unsold inventory, including hundreds of thousands of copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial—often called the worst video game ever made. The company discreetly negotiated a deal with an Alamogordo landfill to dispose of nearly 800,000 cartridges, along with consoles and promotional materials. Decades later, rumors about the so-called Atari Tomb spread online. “It was ranked as one of the biggest urban legends of all time,” says Joe Lewandowski, an Alamogordo resident who owned a waste collection company and witnessed the burial. “Even Atari said it didn’t happen.” In 2014, documentary filmmakers enlisted Lewandowski to help find the mythic treasure buried beneath 30 feet of trash and concrete. The city agreed to the excavation but granted only two days and four acres of access within the 300-acre dump. Thanks to careful research and a lot of luck, the team located 1,382 cartridges, including copies of E.T., Centipede, and Pac-Man. Lewandowski auctioned off most of the haul, raising $107,000 for Alamogordo’s library, zoo, police department, and the Tularosa Basin Museum of History, where a display showcases the story of the excavation. “Now they call me the Indiana Jones of garbage,” he says.
Visit the Tularosa Basin Museum of History at 1004 N. White Sands Boulevard in Alamogordo, and watch the documentary Atari: Game Over (2014).