Alamogordo New Mexico.
A small town, about 30,000 people
but it seems to attract more than its fair share
of strange occurrences.
It's right around the corner from where they
tested the first atomic bomb.
It's also the grave site of Ham, the first chimpanzee...
and really, the first American... to go into space.
And it's the place where this guy broke the land
speed record in a rocket sled.
Which is cool, but also kind of strange.
Despite all of this, the thing that Alamogordo is
best known for is its landfill.
The dump.
Because supposedly, that's where Atari buried E.T.,
the worst video game of all time.
It's been described as the worst video game ever.
E.T. for Atari.
Today we're going to talk about the worst of the worst.
Here's our top 10 worst games ever.
E.T., the Extra Terrestrial?
Now here's the thing about E.T.,
it's widely regarded as the worst video game of all time.
WORST GAME EVER!
We have this myth, or this legend of something
that happened 40 years ago.
♫ Do do... do do do do do do.
Son of a bitch, get out of the fucking hole!
If you grab a piece of the phone,
the FBI agent keeps attacking you.
And if you take a step in any direction,
you fall into a hole.
And if you get out of the hole, you fall right back down!
One of the major design flaws of the games
was that E.T. fell into pits.
Dammit!
Shit!
Oh, come on!
And guess what?
It now lives out it's days in a landfill.
It's rumored that decades ago, truckloads of that game
were dumped in the Alamogordo landfill.
The idea that they had so many of these things,
and they were so unable to sell them, give them away, whatever,
they literally had to drive them out
into the middle of the desert, and bury them like a dead gangster.
It's almost too crazy to be believed.
I think it's kind of silly.
Because it's urban legend.
It's just a great story, I think.
I believe that this story
endures because the adults just don't get it.
And that's satisfying to the young people.
Whatever you look at
what the reasons are for it, nothing makes sense.
What drove someone to need to hide this stuff so intensely?
When I was five years old, Pong came out.
And my dad got it for me and my brother and sister.
When the Atari 2600 came out...
Atari!
...I got every cartridge
I could get my hands on.
I played it constantly.
Atari was like Xbox and PlayStation rolled into one.
It had an 80% market share, and the 2600 was its killer app.
Adventure was probably my favorite game on the 2600.
I spent three weeks sitting in front
of my TV trying to find the first Easter egg
ever hidden in a video game.
It looks kind of stupid now.
You were just a block, who picked up an invisible dot,
and carried it into the special room
to discover the programmer's name.
But to me, finding that hidden screen was like a revelation.
As an adult, I still play a lot of video games.
But I also write and direct movies, that's my job.
I've worked on a lot of big comic book movies
the kind they make shitty video games out of.
And I even wrote some of the shitty video games.
But I'm also fascinated by myths and urban legends.
In fact, 10 years ago, me and this guy Werner Herzog
went to Scotland to find the Loch Ness Monster.
We never did find Nessie, but I still
love an adventure, especially to unravel an urban legend.
Today, video games are everywhere,
so it might be hard to understand my generation's
obsession with Atari.
But for us, it was the gateway drug to a lifelong addiction
to video games.
And then one day it was just gone.
Sometime in the mid '80s, it just disappeared.
And there were no more Atari games.
And I always wondered what happened.
Where did it go?
So, this is the famous landfill?
Yeah.
The burial... the final resting ground of E.T.?
Yeah, this is the place.
This road here, this gate, this is exactly the way the Ataris
would have came through.
Through that ditch, and up through here.
This was the only access in.
Back in those days, it was just pure desert.
And is there any way to get through this,
or are we, I mean...
Well, yeah, it's a high security gate.
Just duck under.
Yeah, I guess that works.
Heh, heh, heh.
Joe Lewandowski's
been the garbage guru, if you will, for a number of years.
He operated various waste disposal companies
within Alamogordo and Otero county.
And when it comes to the Atari graveyard,
I believe he probably has more direct knowledge
of anybody else.
Joe's the guy that's advising the city,
and telling the city where everything is.
And I think that he's the only guy that might be able to walk
out to that dump, and point to a spot on the ground, and say,
this is where it's at.
So, so this whole area, this is where it's buried?
Some people don't believe it's there, but trust me,
it's there.
You can kind of feel it. Right?
It that just me?
Ah, that's pretty much you.
It's just me.
So what are these little boxes, here?
Each one of those boxes represents where garbage is.
I see.
Someone would write down, oh, that's
where we put the Atari trash.
That's where we put, you know.
That's the problem.
Nobody did.
We do today.
So it's looking for... it's like looking for a haystack
in a pile of haystacks.
Pretty much.
And then looking for the needle inside that haystack.
And find the needle.
So it's two levels.
This picture here
is actually out of an old El Paso Times article.
This is actually that day, and that event,
when it actually occurred.
So what we did, is just to figure out,
OK, if this reporter took this picture here,
then the reporter had to be standing
somewhere in this area.
So here's the two cells that we've pinned it down to, now.
So when you come back here, and put
the reporter taking the picture, and you make that line.
And what you're looking for, is to make sure the line
intersects with the buildings.
Joe Lewandowski wasn't just a guy
who knew his way around a dump.
He was also an amateur archaeologist,
kind of like Indiana Jones, but without the gun.
Or the whip.
See, the newspaper photo was like the medallion,
and Joe had used it to construct his own version
of the Staff of Ra.
And that pinpointed the location of the Atari
dump, which is exactly how Indy would have done it.
Joe was clearly obsessed.
He believed in the legend.
He'd spent over three years constructing
a plan to dig up the landfill, and prove it to the world.
But he wasn't a gamer.
He wasn't trying to find out why.
And that's what I wanted to know.
Why would the company I loved so much decide to bury its future?
The whole E.T. story is a very small part of the Atari story.
Let me go back and let me explain how Atari started out.
The video game came because of the convergence
of me working in an amusement park summers,
while pursuing an engineering degree
at the University of Utah.
I knew the economics of the coin operated game business.
They made a lot of money.
Nolan designed these incredibly elegant
circuits.
Put together in a way that's so clever that modern engineers
have a hard time, you know, understanding
and repairing these things.
My partner and I, Ted Dabney, started
working on a ping-pong game.
By the end of '72, we did $3.5 million dollars.
And then we did $19 million.
Then we did $35 million.
It was a hockey stick.
This electronic medium, which was just beginning,
had some traction with people.
And once you played some of the more sophisticated arcade games
of the day, and understood that maybe there
was a chance you could duplicate that in a home game,
your eyes got big.
Home video games have been a success
from the moment a company called Atari
launched this basic game, Pong.
Which has been imitated by at least 40 other manufacturers.
They're selling like crazy.
300,000 last year.
This year, three million.
Next year, six, maybe 10 million.
We felt, well, maybe this is a time to sell
to a company with deep pockets.
I was in my office at Warner in 1976.
The phone rang, and it was a guy named Gordy Crawford,
and he asked the question I've never forgotten.
Would you guys be interested in acquiring a technology based,
fast growing entertainment company?
And I said yes.
I didn't know what I said yes to, but I said yes.
And that led to my introduction to Atari.
Atari, where the future comes from.
What excited me about Atari wasn't Pong,
it was the chipset that led to the Atari 2600.
Pong was sort of OK, you banged up and back, and up and back.
But this meant you could constantly change the games.
And that was a very exciting idea.
We introduced the 2600 in 1977
with nine cartridges.
The home video game was a very close approximation
of the coin-op experience.
It changed the mindset of the world.
Turning the television
from a passive medium into an active medium, that
was what we knew we were doing.
And that was super exciting to be the pioneers in that field.
It just blew people away.
Nobody knew any this stuff.
They made it up as they went.
And they were good at it.
And it started everything.
It was playing those games that taught people
the potential of a computer.
Atari, at some level,
brought the computer revolution.
They started experimentally
hiring smart kids, with this idea that maybe they can
come up with other stuff to do.
And they inadvertently were trying to create
the job of game designer.
Microprocessor real time control programming
is just where it's at.
So, there's two kinds of things you typically do
with that in the early 1980s.
You can do missile guidance systems...
or like we say, kill people for 12 cents a head.
Or you could make video games, which
I thought was a much better application
for the whole thing.
What went on at Atari from the very beginning
was, basically, that the engineers are
going to drive this company.
Because they weren't just engineers.
They were creative guys.
They're like musicians, or movie directors.
They're artists.
Through luck, or providence, or both,
they ended up with this department of game designers
that became this dream team at Atari.
These guys who made all of these classics... Tempest,
and Asteroids, and Centipede, and Gauntlet, and, you know,
think of a game.
The culture was these guys
do what they want to do.
One day, I was standing in the men's room, at a urinal,
and I looked down, and I saw a pair of bare feet next to me.
And I look, and here is a guy wearing a pair of shorts,
and nothing else.
And I said something.
And they said, oh yeah, that's so and so.
He's a great engineer.
He doesn't like to wear clothes.
The coin-op engineers at Atari, they were great.
And on the consumer side, Howard was
one of the best programmers.
He was one of the best of those engineers.
At the heart of the creative process
is the programmer.
I try to create, basically, a sensory experience that evokes
a certain feeling in the user.
I mean, I tend to program from a concept.
I mean, it was... I was made for this.
I mean, was is what I was made to do.
January 11, 1981, I showed up for my first day of work
as a game programmer at Atari.
So, do you remember the first day you showed up here?
Absolutely.
My first office mates were Tod Frye and Rob Zdybel.
And I had an understanding that there
was a lot of dope that was smoked
at Atari, when we were there.
And so on my first day at work, I brought a joint, because I
didn't want to be, you know...
Yeah.
I wanted to be a courteous guest, and so I showed up...
Which by the way, this is a good lesson
for our younger viewers.
If people are doing drugs, bring your own, so you fit in.
Tod walks in, shuts the door, and says,
I'm going to get high in here, so if you
don't want to be around this, you'd better leave.
No, actually, here, I said.
I brought a joint.
And he sort of looked at me and he went pbtt.
I'm going to smoke real stuff.
OK?
That was my introduction.
That was my first day at work.
We wanted people who worked hard, and yet
had fun at doing it.
How do we mix up, so that we don't know the difference
between our work and our play?
The company's motto was, we take fun seriously.
But we used to say, we take fun intravenously.
And they didn't like that very much.
No, I don't know why.
The party atmosphere was actually
calculated plan to incentivize.
I would set quotas.
If the quotas were met, I'd throw a kegger.
They would just roll out in the car,
go to a liquor store, and they gave someone
a company credit card, and they came
back with a bunch of booze.
And we consumed it.
Over there is where the hot tub was.
Inside, on the first floor, there's some great stuff
that went on in that room.
Over here, here's the hill that you know,
one day I was wearing a dashiki shirt, which
I was very into back then.
And I would do somersaults down the hill.
I might have had some cocktails that afternoon, at that point.
Did you know that you were entering this crazy party
atmosphere, that you'd be?
No.
Even though I was told I was, I had no expectation
that it could really exist.
The best recruiting tool
we could have for an engineer, was to bring
him over to one of our parties.
Hey, What's happening, people?
Hey, how's it going?
What's happening?
And they thought, hey, I'm a nerd.
There are girls here.
They're talking to me.
It's good.
That was the culture.
These guys are the lifeblood of the business,
and they do what they want to do.
And that's fine.
In some ways,
things happened to me over the course
of three and a half years here, that made
the next 25 years really tough.
Because it established a standard
of what professional life, and life in general, could be.
And I never let go of the thought
that my life could still be this or better.
I just didn't know how to do it.
It's really intense for me to come back here.
This is the first time I've been back here in 30 years.
And this was the place where I was introduced
to what life could be, for me.
What a working life could be.
What real creative satisfaction could be.
What doing something really meaningful could be.
Those are all things that come back to me in this moment.
And it's just... it's very intense.
So what really happened back in 1983?
People heard the rumors, but Atari denied
the dump ever took place.
And eventually, people forgot about it.
But with the growth of the internet,
and all of its best and worst lists, E.T. and its burial
went from small town gossip to full blown urban legend.
By the mid '90s, videos begin to appear online that seemed
to suggest that anyone with a shovel go out in the desert,
and dig up the buried games.
That's what I thought too, but it wasn't close to that easy.
Joe had spent years researching the burial.
If his information was correct, the games
were not only deep underground, they
were covered with concrete.
Joe was still wading through a sea of red tape.
But if and when the city approved his plan
to excavate the landfill, he was going to need
more than just a shovel.
He would need giant yellow digging machines.
And a bunch of guys in hats and vests to operate them.
This is one of the photos of the actual burial,
when they did it.
So we're looking at, like, 15 feet down, to hit the concrete.
Under the concrete is mostly dirt.
It's just the... it's the bottom of the pit.
What's that thing, right over there?
That's a motor grader.
A motor grader?
Yes.
That's for, really, just fine grading.
You know, like the highways and roads.
And fine planing large areas.
So, we conceivably might need that, for this, right?
No.
I mean, but you might... you could
bring it out before, right?
I mean, you might want to park it there so it's ready.
No, not really.
No.
We're fine.
I don't know.
Not my field.
I am concerned that Joe's
moving kind of quick.
And we do need to throw some brakes on, and slow it down.
The opposition comes from environmentalists,
maybe within the community.
And the concern is that Alamogordo also
may have something else buried in the landfill that
may be hazardous.
And we may not know exactly where this location is.
Nobody really and truly
has dead honest records as to where
everything is buried out there.
And we're talking potential mercury laced
pigs, malathion, possibly DDT.
There's potentially lead in there,
and maybe some other dangerous metals
that are in those cartridges.
I don't want to be in an area where we might crack open
a sealed tomb, so to speak, of these hogs, where
mercury the gas comes out.
So I don't want the Stephen King novel of,
we hit the wrong spot, and all of the sudden
we are evacuating Alamogordo.
That is unacceptable.
If there's a problem that the New Mexico
Environmental Department perceives,
we're not going to be able to proceed.
Until I'm satisfied it's safe, it's not going to happen.
At least within my power.
You know, there's only so much power that I have.
So, for my first game,
they wanted me to do a coin-op conversion.
Although I had only been there for about
a week, I went to my manager, and I said, you know something?
I said this game, Star Castle, on the 2600
is just going to suck.
I know it's going to suck.
And I said, but I think I can take some of the key things
that I think make it fun game, and re-work it so
that it would work on the 2600.
And so they said, OK, go ahead.
Do what you want to do.
So, how did you learn how to program a game?
I just read the manual
and started writing the game.
No one had ever done, like, a backstory for a game before.
And I thought, this is my first game,
and I want to be involved in every part of it.
And I want to make it the best thing it could possibly be.
So I wrote this, like, seven, eight page story.
I stayed up all night just writing this story.
Knocked it out.
And it was a science fiction story
about flies that get on the first interstellar spaceships,
and mutate, and evolve, and take over the solar system.
But now they're under attack by this other monster, and stuff.
And that's the short version of the story.
So I thought, well, I need to name it.
So what I did, was I named it Yar, because that's
Ray spelled backwards.
And Ray Kassar was the CEO of Atari.
Right?
So I've got his name keyed into the title.
And I thought, revenge, great action word.
You know, so that's compelling.
And so that's how it became Yar's Revenge.
When Yar's Revenge came out, it was a hit.
It was huge.
Games that could look like Yar's Revenge
looked... that could draw that kind of stuff...
were, like, magical.
Even though Yar's Revenge might look primitive... you know,
it looks like a superconducting super collider
compared to a lot of the games that
were out there at the time.
I remember the first time I put the cartridge in,
and I was like, what is this?
It really is a very innovative shooter of that era.
Getting a ship to fly around.
So it's fun just to fly the ship around.
It was a trick, especially on that hardware.
The enemy was cool and scary.
And it felt really good to defeat it.
You feel like it's your victory when you beat those challenges.
And you feel like it's your defeat when they beat you.
And you keep coming back, because you
didn't lose by being cheated.
You didn't lose because the game did something unfair.
You lost because you weren't quite good enough.
And all of the great games sit right on that edge.
I remember playing Yar's Revenge one day,
and we happened on trick that let you...
if you were on this right spot at the right time in the game,
and it was in between levels... these initials came up.
And the initials were HSW.
To us, it was some weird mystery.
And like, we had to figure out what HSW meant.
And finally, in one of the game magazines,
they published what HSW meant.
Turns out, HSW means Howard Scott Warshaw,
the guy who made the game.
Yar's Revenge was the first game
that Atari ever did, where the programmer's name
went outwith the cartridge.
Yar's Revenge had a lot of firsts,
and that was just one of them.
Yar's Revenge is the bestselling original game
for the Atari 2600.
It sold something like a million copies.
Every reviewer at the time thought
Yar's Revenge was one of the best games Atari put out.
You know it made a lot of money for Atari.
In 1981, this was a company
that made operating profits of something like $375 million.
One of today's greatest marketing triumphs
in the entertainment field is video games.
It was beyond comprehension.
The fastest growing company in American history.
This was an explosion.
Even those of us who were in the middle of it
were shaking our heads, going, oh my god, this is amazing.
We were the most successful coin-op company,
we were the dominant consumer company.
And we sat around literally saying to ourselves,
what are the categories of games?
What are the capabilities of the 2600?
Where is this industry going?
Everything that Joe
has put together on this Atari graveyard, so far,
seems to be coming true.
I'm in favor of the Atari games being dug up,
because it is the largest myth in the gaming world.
I believe that Joe just thinks it would
be an outstanding event for Alamogordo,
and a way to get us on the map.
On Tuesday, Alamogordo's city commission
approved a deal to dig in the old landfill
within the next six months.
The city has given its OK,
and now the state has given them approval.
Film crews will be in Alamogordo.
The documentary film crews will
start probing the dump for their strange buried treasure
at 9:30 AM.
So, this is an impressive looking machine
out here.
What the hell is it doing?
What's this drilling rig does, it goes down, straight down,
and takes out core samples, and brings
up whatever's in the ground.
We've narrowed it down from 300 acres down
to about 5 to 10 acres.
And so, What we're doing now is trying to get it even closer.
We're looking for things like somebody's mail...
you know, the postmarks... newspapers, things like that.
Looking for dates.
We're looking for September of '83.
Don't you think people are going
to be disappointed if we dig it up,
and we don't actually find the E.T. games?
I mean, wouldn't that be?
That would be very disappointing for all of us.
All the work.
Three years of work put into this thing.
So what do we do then?
You're just going to dig up the whole landfill, or something'?
No, we can't.
The environment department will not allow that to happen.
You're saying that there's a possibility
that this could turn out to be a giant waste of time.
I think I've said it before, I'll bet the car,
I won't bet the house.
Most everybody, at least in the Western world,
has played a video game of some kind.
They've gone to an arcade.
They know the Atari brand.
They certainly know E.T.
And so I think there's a universal curiosity
about this game.
You know, something did happen those couple of nights in 1983
that I think it merits serious investigation.
So why did I decide to go to Alamogordo?
I'm very much interested in the impact
that a particular game or an industry
has made within a cultural and social context.
What's striking about the Atari E.T. game
in the Alamogordo landfill is that they're
there and not in museums.
I think this is what excites many people
who keep this narrative alive is they want to get these items.
They want visible proof.
They want some kind of tangible evidence
that that dump did take place.
I've been professionally
making games since about '94.
But more than that, I'm somebody who
has been chiefly doing a lot of historical work
with video games.
Trying to preserve video games, and get
people to understand that video games are more like art.
And so I've been doing a lot of video game
preservation and education.
I always thought, one day, I'm going to get over there,
I'm going to see, finally, once and for all,
like, where it's buried.
I almost don't even really need to know what's in it.
I almost want to keep that mystery alive.
To me, under that landfill is actually the burial
site of an entire industry.
Because what affected Atari at the time, affected everyone.
And everything that I thought was going to go on forever
stopped.
And it stopped almost at that same moment
that these... whatever's there... was buried.
So, for me, I want to find out what is there.
It's like opening the Ark of the Covenant.
It's like, you kind of want to look,
but is my face going to melt off?
I don't know.
I have told my wife that I will be going to New Mexico.
And she asked me why.
And I started to explain, and she said,
I don't... I don't need to know.
Just go do it.
You want it Ernest on screen?
Oh, whatever.
Ernest is my fancy writer name.
Ernie is what everybody calls me.
All right, so we'll use your writer's name.
How would you describe yourself?
Screenwriter, novelist, gentleman adventurer.
The thing about having an Atari, for me, was it was a simulator.
Like, I could simulate being Indiana Jones,
or simulate being E.T.
Having access to that.
And coming from a family of, like, modest means,
and not having to, you know, beg for quarters.
And just being able to play as much as you wanted.
That was such a huge part of my childhood,
and fed my imagination.
And that was the inspiration for Ready Player One, my novel.
The idea of, like, what if Willy Wonka
had been a video game designer?
And he held his golden ticket contest inside his greatest
video game creation?
That all came from finding those Easter
eggs in all those Atari games.
I feel like a little kid, this past week.
Like, getting ready to go to camp.
Alamogordo, and the Atari graveyard.
For me, it's like holy ground.
And that was when I realized my DeLorean
is already in New Mexico.
I just have to fly to Santa Fe, pick up my DeLorean from George
R. R. Martin... who was using it for the Back
to the Future screening... and drive it down to Alamogordo.
I could stop at the very large array,
and also hit Roswell, and then go to Alamogordo,
and be there for the excavation of the Atari graveyard.
As soon as those, you know, tumblers clicked into place,
I'm like, the most epic road trip of all time.
I have to go.
It's like I'm Indy going to Westeros to meet Doc Brown,
and then save E.T.
Boom.
Have a great drive, and a great time in Alamogordo.
George, thank you so much.
I appreciate it man.
My pleasure.
This is a good piece of evidence,
because right here.
Is that the date, right there?
Yeah, a date.
You've got Sunday, October 2, 1983, right there.
That's good, right?
Yeah.
Atari was from the 23rd to the 29th of September.
So this is like a week later.
Well, it's not even a week.
It's like two or three days later.
Well, I'm not very good at math.
The Ataris would have been on the bottom,
then garbage from the following weeks
would've been piled on top.
So where are the games?
This is following week.
No games yet.
No Atari stuff at all?
No, not yet.
Not yet.
OK.
I love the challenges.
I love the mystery.
I love the... especially when people say they'll never
be found, or they're not there.
That just makes the challenge even better.
I put three to four years of this research, planning,
the politics, the environment department.
I mean, many, many, many things to get to this point.
Yeah, no.
It's very important that we find them.
So, back in the early '80s,
movie licenses for video games were just
starting to come into vogue.
And I think Raiders was the first one.
So they needed someone to do Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I think what happened was, Yar's was very successful,
and so they wanted me to do a big game.
And then it was up to Spielberg.
So when I went down and met with Spielberg,
and if Spielberg would have said, you know,
I don't think he's really right for the game,
they would have sent someone else.
Can Indiana Jones escape from the forces of evil?
In Atari's Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure game.
What was the reception to the Raiders
of the Lost Ark game?
It was another million seller.
Raiders was huge.
I mean, I can honestly say I'm the only programmer
in the history of Atari where every one of my games
that was released was a million seller.
The word meteoric comes to mind.
And now, Steven Spielberg brings us
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.
Spielberg says, well, you know, my pictures, they open slow.
And they build, and they hold, and da da da da da.
And I just looked at him, and I didn't know anything.
I said, not this one.
It was E.T.
I said, it's going to open huge and it's going to stay huge.
OK, the movie comes out.
It's a huge hit.
And we want to do the cartridge of it.
OK?
You know, every time you try to take some kind of a property
and move it into another medium for a pure profit motive,
you get trouble.
Specifically, with respect to games, you know, it's like,
oh you know, like, let's go see if we can
exploit this movie as a game.
You know, maybe we could make extra money
out of a profitable franchise.
Now, there was a negotiation going on between the Atari
people, and the people at Universal,
about what we're going to pay.
And Steve Ross, who was the CEO from Warner, got in,
and for whatever the reasons, he agrees to a deal that is so off
the chart nobody believes it.
But he does it.
N was $20 to $30 million, it was some crazy number.
Steve Ross basically was trying to woo Steven Spielberg to come
to work for Warner, because he recognized
that Spielberg was a genius.
And that all plays into this story.
Well, we acquired the rights to E.T.,
and it was... we had to have the game out for Christmas.
And that's a problem.
One afternoon, I'm sitting in my office, and a call comes in.
And It's Ray Kassar.
And he's calling from Monterey.
So I take the call, and Ray Kassar comes on the phone,
and he says,
Howard, can you do E.T. in five weeks?
And I said, yes I can.
And he goes...
OK.
In two days, I want you to be at San Jose Executive Airport.
There'll be a Learjet waiting for you.
Be on that jet.
Be ready to propose the game to Spielberg.
During that meeting, when I flew down on a Learjet to go
meet Spielberg and present the game to him.
Even though I only had five weeks,
I still wanted to innovate.
So I proposed a 3D world that the game
was going to take place on.
And the huge scope what I was trying to achieve,
it walks that line between really trying to make something
happen and venturing into the impossible,
and walking off a cliff.
The emotionality of the game was supposed
to come out through the interaction
with the characters.
You have the FBI agent who's interested in what you have.
That's why the FBI agent just steals
stuff that you were holding.
You have the scientist who's interested in who you are.
The scientist actually carries you back to the city,
because they want to study you.
And Elliott comes in to save you.
There's times when you can call Elliott,
and he will help you out.
And so, those are the kind of things
that I had that I thought created, possibly,
some sentiment.
And at one point, Spielberg says to me, he goes, you know,
couldn't you do something more like Pac-Man?
No, Steven, we need to do a game that's fresh.
We need to do something that's really worthy of this movie.
It's not how simple you can make a complicated game.
It's how complicated a game can you
make subject to the constraint of easy learnability.
My job is to produce a cartridge that
is going to sell for Atari.
A typical VCS game at the time took five or six months.
And this is going to be in five weeks.
You might think, no, nobody can do a game in five weeks.
Like most people in the department would think.
But I don't think that way.
I think, yeah, I can do that.
The word hubris comes to mind.
I mean, whatever it is I might have been full of,
I was overflowing with it at that point.
Because if the game can't make the Christmas market,
the game is a total waste.
They're going miss their window.
So that was the big thing.
It was the $22 million bet that you could turn
the game around in that time.
I had a development station moved into my home,
so I could be basically working on this game almost 24 hours.
We found that there was a good probability of success.
We took a coin operated game and just ported it over to a game
that we could play on the VCS.
E.T. didn't have that.
Hello?
Is somebody out there?
E.T. video game?
Wow.
It's the video game that
lets you pretend you're E.T.
OK.
So the game's done.
And one of the conditions I asked for
was that Steven Spielberg is the one
who approves the final game.
So Steven Spielberg played the final game
and approved it for release.
Howard, who is a certifiable genius,
went off and, about, a number of weeks
later came back with a concept and a game plan.
I was amazed at how difficult it was, yet at the same time
how much fun it was to play.
I've seen the final game.
Oh yeah, yeah, it's my favorite.
Of course I'm biased, I made the movie.
Steven Spielberg thought it was OK,
so I thought, all right, I'm good with that.
And... not that I'm blaming him for anything.
No, of course not.
But...
But it's his fault.
The video game that lets you help E.T. get home
just in time for Christmas.
After E.T. was released,
there was a great sense of relief
that we'd actually made the schedule.
And everything was good.
And then the game went out into market,
and it was very high on the billboard list.
And again, things were good.
I got E.T., I think it was Christmas of 1982,
if I remember correctly.
And I thought it was like... I was
to be the guy on the street who had E.T. before everybody else.
Turns out everybody I knew got E.T. that Christmas.
After a while,
people start going by me in the halls... people
from other buildings, people from marketing, and management.
And they're saying things like, you know, you know something,
Howard, you did a great job.
We don't blame you.
That was really something, what you did.
You really came through for us there,
and we don't want you to think we think anything else.
This really isn't about you.
Don't feel bad.
It's OK, it's cool.
And I'm thinking, like, what the hell are they talking about?
E.T. was a really hard game.
It was the kind of game that was brutal, unfair,
it didn't make a lot of sense.
I grew up in London,
and there was a video game store in my town
that let you rent... I don't know what the rental was, like 50
pence for a weekend... and I still remember
feeling like I wasted my money.
Because it just... it was bad.
People aren't liking it.
And people aren't liking it a lot.
And what made it particularly bad was my memory of the movie
was SO great.
I loved the movie.
Everyone loved the movie when it came out.
It's a great movie.
Still is it is a classic movie today.
And so this massive chasm that existed
between the quality of the movie and the quality of the game
that was based on, I think just made it seem that much more
like a slap in the face.
OK, well, maybe it won't sell six million.
Maybe it will only sell four million.
Or three million, that would be OK.
And then there's, like, returns.
People are returning the game.
They made too many.
How many they made, I don't even know.
They made, like, four million cartridges.
That means there could be millions of carts coming back.
So what do you do with useless, worthless product'?
How do you get rid of it?
Bury it.
That's a pretty good answer.
Well, career change
is not anything new for me.
I've been through a number of different careers.
I actually went and got a California real estate
license, and then a broker's license,
and did that for a while.
And I did that just long enough to know
this was, like, the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
And now I am a licensed, practicing psychotherapist
in California.
And I'm a very unique therapist, in that I have a Master's
of Engineering and I also have a Master of Arts
in counseling psychology.
I mean, I'm the Silicon Valley therapist.
I'm very good at translating between English and nerd.
And this is the first time since I left Atari that I feel I'm
doing what I really love doing.
So it took me 30 years to get back to a place
that I don't feel I'm a step down from where I used to work.
And that's many, many different jobs.
I know this dig is coming up, and I'm going to be there.
I'm going to be standing right there.
And I am going to literally watch my past being dug up.
And that's a weird kind of thing to anticipate.
My hopes are in one way, and my expectations are another.
And I don't know what it's going to be.
I really don't know what it's going to be.
I don't know what it's going to mean to me when,
if something comes up, if it's there.
Part of punk archeology is that sense of community.
And the fact that we're helping each other out
to address the issues that we're interested in.
And most of the time we're doing it on a volunteer basis.
It's going to be interesting to see how they decide to excavate
in order to clear a better area, you know,
so that we can get at more of the content that we need.
One of the people down there did confirm finding
a Donny and Marie poster.
Yeah, yeah, which is awesome.
Well, basically, because we're going
to treat this as a salvage excavation,
we will dig a trench.
We'll go through and excavate the material in the pits
that we dig.
At which point, we'll send them up to the tables.
We'll sort through the material.
We'll weigh it.
We'll count it.
Identify it.
And, yeah, that's the plan.
What's happened so far today?
Basically, we started digging in the hole,
and the trucks have already started
going through the train.
So, just so people understand... and probably, right now I'm
cutting to an awesome diagram of this.
There's, like, 20 feet of garbage
that's on the top of wherever the games are buried.
Garbage and dirt.
Sorry, garbage and dirt.
In the diagram it's going to be pretty clear.
And so, that all has to be taken away.
Yeah, we'll get the vast majority
of the hole excavated out.
And so far, have we found anything?
Found any Atari games?
No, nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing yet.
And Son, I mean, you seem pretty nervous.
Right.
Are you?
Oh yeah, terrified.
Terrified.
OK.
I gotta be honest, I'm nervous as shit.
I don't know if that'll help motivate you guys, but...
Yeah, that did it for us.
We need to get back to work.
Yeah.
Great.
Let's go.
Go team.
Way to go.
Son, calm down, buddy.
People say nerd or geek.
I say enthusiast.
I love things, and I love people who love things.
But if you spend all your time focusing on all the amazing,
like, art and entertainment that's being made,
there's so much of it happening now,
you can't even take it all in.
And it's like the dig.
When I tell people, like, the right kind people about it,
they're like, I can't believe that it's finally happening.
And that you're going to get to be there.
You know, I get, look, goosebumps.
Goosebumps talking about it.
My local video game shop in Austin, Texas, Game
Over Video Games, they gave me every copy they have
of every one of Howard's games.
Little known fact... E.T. has the very first official video game
Easter egg ever in a video game.
Warren Robinett had the very first one in Adventure,
but he did that without anybody knowing.
Howard asked if he could put Easter eggs in the game,
and Atari said yes.
If you go find the geranium, and you
make the germanium regenerate, it turns
into Yar, from Yar's Revenge.
And he flies away.
The first time it happened to me, when I was 11 years old,
I shit myself.
And then if you do it again, it turns into Indy
from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
So Howard hid characters from this game
and this game in this game.
Hello.
Hi, good afternoon.
Welcome to the Lodge.
Well, it's nice to be here.
Are you checking in? - Absolutely.
Great.
Can I get the last name.
Warshaw.
W-A-R-S-H-A-W.
Howard.
That's me.
So it's the day of the actual dig.
And my Wife and I are in a van, on our way to the landfill.
It was a strange feeling.
I mean, I was, like, nervous.
And I didn't really understand why.
But I just had this sense... just like a tingly thing...
that something is going on here today.
And as we pull into the landfill,
there were already people there.
And there's more people.
And we go on, and there's more people.
And it just keeps going and going.
I guess it sort of felt like a religious pilgrimage to me.
I called up some friends, and said, hey,
can we get down there?
And I asked my brother-in-law if he wanted to go.
Heck, let's do it. Let's check it out.
And my wife said, whatever.
It's one of those weird monumental video
game based events that only comes around once a century.
This is our generation's urban legend.
Billions of cartridges out in the desert.
Growing up, you always read the little rumors about it.
I grew up playing an Atari, which
my babysitters had given me.
And I actually had the E.T. game.
My friend and I, she and I would actually
just for fun on the weekends, drive
around trying to figure out where would
these Atari games be buried.
It's the fun of the legend.
It's like looking for the Loch Ness monster.
What did you think when you played
the E.T. game last night?
It was awesome.
Because in my opinion, I like terrible games.
To come back and to relive the feeling
I got off those games is something I couldn't pass up.
I just want to know about the urban myth.
See if it's really buried out here.
I just came out here to be part of video game history.
Had to see whether it's true or not.
You have to be a special kind of nerd
to be able to want to drive 28 hours for a video game.
The myth that E.T., the video game,
for the Atari 2600 was the worst video game all time,
it would be so great to debunk that,
because it's just not true.
But also to redeem Howard Scott Warshaw,
because he's an amazing video game designer,
and his game was great.
Ha ha, cool car.
Yeah, I like that.
E.T.'s in there.
This morning, coming to a dump
in a small town in New Mexico.
There were people lined up, waiting to get in.
When's the last time you saw line of people
waiting to get into a dump?
It totally took me by surprise, but in a delightful way.
You never go to a dump unless you're throwing something away,
and here we are, trying to find treasure... buried treasure.
I think they'll find something.
I mean, the cartridges had to go somewhere.
Why not here?
It is a lot of open space, great place
to dump a million cartridges.
There is a definite possibility that there is games.
This is archeology for the time I grew up.
So nostalgia for anything that came out of that era
is pretty high.
All right, now the wind is really picking up, on cue.
On cue.
The weather here, in Alamogordo
is awesome if you like sandstorms
and an impending doom filled cloud of white.
Whoa.
Aw, this is getting brutal.
Yeah.
Sorry, this is brutal.
Getting very windy.
Basically, what's happening is the white sands
are blowing in from White Sands, and covering everything.
And it's really shitty.
They're saying this is like a historic wind today.
Really?
That's what somebody told us.
To think that we're
in the middle of a sandstorm.
Really?
This is what's going on?
And for me it was almost like the big sand storm
right at the opening of Close Encounters,
you know, the people wearing the goggles and the bandannas.
Everybody's like, gather around, because they found something.
And they can't believe what they've found.
Are we the first?
This is Tony Johnson, from Denver,
Colorado, who ran up to me in my DeLorean.
He's like, I found something.
I found something.
And Tony is going to go down in history,
because he found the first evidence of Atari hardware.
Whoa.
Whoa, that's pretty huge.
Right there it is, my man.
Uh, ladies and gentlemen, we have an announcement.
So, Tony, tell us what you just found.
An Atari 2600 joystick toggle.
So, Tony, where did you find it?
Walking to the bathroom.
So it was a surface find?
Surface find.
Yeah, like we know what a surface find is, right?
Well, a surface find is something... you know,
you're walking around, you're looking down on the ground,
you see something interesting and you pick it up.
It's totally out of archaeological context.
What are the odds that that, like, blew out of the hole?
Actually, I think they're pretty good.
I mean, the wind is blowing fiercely in that direction.
You know, the stuff's coming out of the bucket.
You know, we've been finding a lot of interesting things
that date from around that time.
Anything from Atari?
Uh, nothing from Atari yet.
How can you authenticate this?
Can you carbon date it?
No, it's much too recent for that.
There are really two things that we could be dealing with,
when taking a look at these cartridges,
if they're actually there.
First thing is that they just loaded
the trucks are these cartridges, and then they dumped them.
And that's the best possible scenario,
because you could pull them out, and I bet you
most of them would be playable.
You know, they've just been in there
for... you know, since 1983.
We're right about where we need to be,
but there's still no Atari detritus at all.
We've been here for a while, all ready.
It's tedious.
The wind's horrible.
We're wondering if they're going to find anything or not.
I don't think there's anything in that hole
except rattlesnakes and scorpions.
If it's buried, it's probably for a reason.
It should stay buried.
I wasn't thinking that something was really
messed up until late '83.
To me, Atari was never going to go away.
It was this thing that was just part of my life.
And the thought that there could ever
be a day where there was no Atari... or no Atari 2600... I
never crossed my mind.
E.T. comes out, and E.T. is not so great.
And somewhere toward the end of the year
I'm starting to wonder, are we making our numbers?
Which leads to one of the worst nights of my life.
On December 7, 1982 I get a call from Dennis Groth, who
was the CFO of Atari, and he says,
Manny, here's the new budget.
And it's a huge shortfall from what we have been told.
Warner Communications said today
that its once booming Atari business lost another $180
million dollars in the third quarter, for total losses
this year of more than half a billion dollars.
I was starting to see enough signs in the company
that things were starting to unravel.
It was unraveling is hard and fast.
And we didn't have any ready solutions.
Several Atari executives, including Atari's chairman,
Raymond Kassar, sold Warner stock shortly
before the negative earnings announcement,
and the decline in the price of the stock.
Kassar denies any wrongdoing or impropriety,
but a number of stockholders have sued Warner.
So they got rid of Ray Kassar,
and they brought in a guy from Phillip Morris.
And when he came in, Atari had 10,000 employees.
And within about four months, or five months,
Atari had 2000 employees.
I really got that we had lost 80% of our staff.
In the short run, the market is frequently irrational.
In the longer run, hopefully it's rational.
The wild upside ride was over.
I did not understand the extent of the downside ride that was coming.
This is slipping away.
The train is derailing.
It's not going to keep riding, and what am I going to do next?
It was a big emotional blow.
It was my baby, and I hated to see it abused.
New Media magazine
credited E.T. with destroying the video game industry.
That's interesting.
I think that's really interesting that I could be
single handedly responsible for toppling
a billion dollar industry.
E.T. comes out.
The industry dies.
Howard's associated with that, and I
think that's... that's affected his career,
and what people will remember him for.
And that's... that's pretty bad.
The fact that a guy's career
got destroyed because he did E.T.,
given the circumstances surrounding doing E.T.,
is... it's completely unfair.
I mean, it's sad.
It's really sad.
There's this video game walk of fame.
There's also this show called DICE, where they give out
lifetime achievement awards.
Howard's not in that.
He's not put in that same group.
They kind of keep him out of all these things,
and it's kind of a shame.
The day I left Atari.
When things had really fallen apart, and it was over.
And I'm literally carrying my garbage out to my car
to leave for the last time.
That was a very depressing moment for me.
Because I felt I was losing the most
important thing in my life.
And I also knew it was so unreal that I'd
never be able to recreate it.
The burial in Alamogordo is basically Atari's funeral.
The burial of those cartridges represents the burial
of that beautiful era.
And that may be what's interesting about it.
I don't know, I mean, that's a whole psychology
I'm not going to go near.
But it may be because it is about the death of Atari.
That's what it is.
We can't control how the past returns to us.
We may get something that no longer
resembles an E.T. cartridge.
We may get something monstrous, something twisted,
something decayed.
We may not even know what we're looking
at if we unearth Atari's E.T...
Part of me feels that when you finally crack open
this place, and you start to look,
it's going to be a lot like the Ark of the Covenant.
It's just going to be a bunch of sand.
But another part of me hopes that what's
found there is going to lead to a lot more
understanding, and a lot more discovery
about what really happened.
What's his name?
Joe.
Joe!
They want me to come in?
Let's go.
So what's up?
You guys find something?
I should have brought my binoculars.
Could you show me?
They're bringing some stuff
over to the archaeologists' table right now.
Let's see what's going on.
Can everybody hear me?
We found something.
The archaeologists have confirmed it's from 1983.
28 feet down.
It's E.T., the video game.
Intact in its box.
Wow.
There you go, Son.
It's an emotional, emotional event.
They've backed up this legend with fact,
and it's incredible to be a part of it.
Good job, Joe.
I wasn't nervous until we got down to that, where he was
almost reaching his max length.
But yeah, it was a big weight off my shoulders
when that bucket came up and E.T. was there.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
I didn't think they were going to find them intact,
I thought for sure they'd be crushed and ruined.
Now I've got goosebumps, and it's
not because of the dust storm.
What's this moment like for you?
Look at all the excitement that's
been generated today over something
that I did 32 years ago.
It just... it's an immensely personal thing.
What it took to make these games, was a lot.
And this one was done in five weeks.
That was one of the hardest five weeks of my life.
So I need a little moment.
I'm just so excited to be here.
A lot of these people are complaining about E.T.
and never actually even played it.
And I ever since then, I would talk to people,
and we would talk about E.T., and I'm like,
well, have you ever played the game?
And it would come out that they didn't.
They would just kind of continue this myth of the game
being really horrible.
It is a good game.
It wasn't the worst that Atari had to offer.
There was, like... I remember getting a game called Fire Fly.
That is the worst game for Atari.
That's what every should be focusing
their efforts on, not E.T.
Now let me be clear, the worst game ever made
was obviously Trespasser.
So I just want to be clear with that.
With the shitload of just horrible, poorly made
cranked out Atari games, to call E.T.
the worst one is just... shameful.
In contemporary game culture we like trashing games.
I don't mean putting them in landfills,
but verbally, trashing game design.
It's become fashionable to sort of regard E.T. as the worst
video game of all time.
In fact, it makes everybody's list as the number one.
And I'm going to go out on a complete limb
here, and say... maybe people will attack me for this...
but I'd rather play Atari's E.T. than any Call of Duty.
In context, given the time and the situation that Howard had
to live in, to program that game,
it really is an astonishing master work.
He made an amazing fucking game that's
a whole self-contained world in five weeks,
that's even more impressive.
I don't know any human being who could have turned
E.T., in the time frames involved,
into a really successful game.
He should be applauded for being
able to have done anything in the time that was allotted.
The scorn should be heaped upon those
who thought it was even rational to try to build a cartridge
in a month and a half.
The analogy that people always use for these first timers...
for people who try something first...
is the first penguin analogy.
Where the first penguin who jumps down the hole
through the ice is the one who invariably
gets eaten by the seal.
But if there wasn't a first penguin,
then the penguins wouldn't be going down through the ice.
So, it sucks to be the first penguin,
but somebody's got to do it.
So it turned out that Joe Lewandowski
had been right all along.
The games were buried, almost exactly where he had predicted.
And no mercury filled pigs popped up out of the ground.
So the legend of the burial was true.
Or was it?
When the archaeologists cataloged all the games,
there were a bunch of E.T. cartridges,
but nowhere near the millions that were
such a big part of the legend.
In fact, E.T. made up about 10% of the total games found.
The rest included some of the best games ever made,
Defender, and Centipede, and Yar's Revenge.
There was even one copy of Adventure, which I snagged.
The burial wasn't a cover up, or done out of shame.
It was a warehouse dump done by a company
in financial distress.
At the time, the Alamogordo landfill was just
the most practical solution.
E.T. wasn't buried because it was the worst game ever.
People called it the worst game ever
because it had been buried.
And as a result, it got blamed for destroying
an entire industry.
The game and its creator had taken the rap
for a crime they didn't commit.
The notion that E.T. caused the demise of Atari
is simply stupid.
It's just stupid.
Atari committed suicide.
It was not homicide.
And it wasn't the E.T. cartridge.
It was a concomitant effect of a lot of missteps in technology,
and deployment, and marketing.
Some people say E.T. destroyed the video game industry.
And I'm sure I've heard that before,
but it's just really funny.
No.
The behavior pattern that created the conditions
for the E.T. failure is what destroyed
the video game industry.
The cause of the fall was Atari trying to sell yet
another 10 million Atari 2600s into a market that
was saturated.
E.T. didn't destroy Atari.
It wasn't good, but it didn't destroy Atari.
That's one of those things people say.
And the reality of life is, if enough people say it,
it becomes the truth for people.
A simple answer that is clear and precise
will always have more power in the world
than a complex one that is true.
Here's another E.T. six-pack.
What I would like to see happen,
is I would like to see whatever remains are recovered
will then find their way into a museum,
in the service of game history.
Well, you know, the city of Alamogordo
owns the games and what have you
that came through there, by virtue of the fact
they are in our landfill.
We might be able to sell them on eBay.
So, if another terrible video game needed
to be buried, will you be prepared to
let it be buried in Alamogordo?
Absolutely.
Come on down, we'll bury your game.
Atari was the first great consumer company
to come out of Silicon Valley.
It was exciting.
It was different.
It was the first engagement that a generation
had with computers.
So a generation grew up being introduced to the computer age
by Atari games.
We brought a whole massive new entertainment medium
into public consciousness.
So for a whole generation, we are the definition
of the video game era.
And it's cosmic.
These guys really never got their due for really
starting the whole industry.
Three lives was invented by a person.
Flying a ship around was invented by a person, who had
to figure out what that was.
And it was so good that it was copied everywhere.
And because it was copied everywhere,
and because it's so ubiquitous,
it's impossible to remember why it was so special.
I think Atari's legacy is that we
started the Silicon Valley ethic of engineers as rock stars.
It didn't exist before.
I think the casual culture, the meritocracy,
didn't exist before.
I believe these were underpinnings of the things
that made, and continue to make, Silicon Valley
a special place in the world.
And I think that Atari will continue to endure
as an icon of innovation.