Atari and the Alamogordo dig

Oblong

Oblong

Day 1 Gamer - 1976
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Sep 11, 2013
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Anyone watch the documentary available on Xbox Live about the excavation of the E.T. Atari games in a landfill in Mexico? It not only covers the dig but also a little history about Atari and early gaming. Overall it was pretty well made with a few laugh out loud moments.

I just picked up a signed Nolan Bushnell and Howard Warshaw Atari 2600 for charity and am now looking at getting one of the E.T. games found in the dig, maybe a Yars Revenge too as the city is auctioning off the "trash" they found. Yeah, it's garbage but also a huge part of history and my childhood so it really resonates with my start in gaming. You can find the landfill games on ebay if interested...they are fairly pricey.

At the very least I would recommend watching the documentary to see a glimpse into the early days of gaming.
 
Look forward to watching it when I get a little free time. Glad to hear it was enjoyable, I think it sounds pretty interesting. I never even had an Atari though, too young.
 
I think what makes it so interesting for me is I lived and gamed through those days and without Internet and such all this info sheds a completely new light on what was happening behind the scenes at the time. These days so much info about devs are easily available and I even personally know a fair number on a first name basis that work at EA, Epic, Zynga, and a couple other studios.

My boys watched it with me, gamers themselves, and their comment afterwards was, "Games back the were made by 1 person?!? Mind blown". Of course they were much simpler back then but things they came up with are still present in games you see today.
 
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I though this dig happened last spring/summer. On a local news channel they actually had a news bite about it around a week ago! And that they found some games and people were trying to sell them for $100s of dollars.
 
UPDATE: After a few failed attempts I am now the proud owner of a certified Alamogordo Dig E.T. cartridge. Please don't ask how much I paid for a 30 year piece of garbage...I just had to have it. :oops::banana:

No need for me to respond to the "I'm such a gamer I..." thread, lol.
 
I laugh a little when people complain about "broken" games today. You mean only the single player works? :laugh:

Those old enough to remember games like this understand what bad games are all about.
 
Did you happen to watch the documentary Kerosene? If not I think you would really appreciate it. It makes some good arguments against the villification of the E.T. game as the "worst game ever"...those of us who have been around awhile know there are many, many, many worse stinkers than that despite the fact that game was made by 1 person in 6 weeks time to meet the holidays. Thinks are much different today...or are they?!? :wink:
 
I haven't seen it yet, but I will definitely watch it. I keep forgetting to check it out. It sounds interesting. Honestly I remember getting the game and hating it, but I don't remember the details.
 
Yeah, anyone who says ET is the worst game ever created obviously has not played Totemball for the 360.
 
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This was fantastic. Everyone should watch this. Young gamers need to see how it all started, and older gamers will enjoy reliving the past.

It really shows the power of negativity on the internet today too. People who weren't even born at the time putting it on their worst games ever list.
 
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Kerosene31 said:
I laugh a little when people complain about "broken" games today. You mean only the single player works? :laugh:

Those old enough to remember games like this understand what bad games are all about.
Click to expand...
Yup. Aside from some awful $1 indie games, the overall batch of gaming now has games much better than the old eras. Great for nostalgia, but if old games were so great why do people crave recent games? If old games are so great, they should be spending their money ad getting a slew of $1-10 indie games instead of that shiny new $60 game.

As for broken, the worst was early 90s PC gaming. Constant upgrades, bugs, crashes, DOS, drivers which barely worked, mailing in and asking for patches on a 3.5 disk that comes 4 weeks later. And nothing like the feeling of plugging in a sound car or crappy joystick and noticing your PC's performance just dropped 20% because some reason the cpu can't handle it, while plugging in a controller into a Sega Genesis works flawlessly. And bumping up to higher quality Sound Blaster 16 or 32 sound cards also ate up cpu.

Amazing how Windows 95 helped fix a lot of that stuff. Somehow, they worked with all the manufacturers and got all kind of software updates/drivers built into the CD-rom so it made things easier.
 
Intellivision said:
Yup. Aside from some awful $1 indie games, the overall batch of gaming now has games much better than the old eras. Great for nostalgia, but if old games were so great why do people crave recent games? If old games are so great, they should be spending their money ad getting a slew of $1-10 indie games instead of that shiny new $60 game.

As for broken, the worst was early 90s PC gaming. Constant upgrades, bugs, crashes, DOS, drivers which barely worked, mailing in and asking for patches on a 3.5 disk that comes 4 weeks later. And nothing like the feeling of plugging in a sound car or crappy joystick and noticing your PC's performance just dropped 20% because some reason the cpu can't handle it, while plugging in a controller into a Sega Genesis works flawlessly. And bumping up to higher quality Sound Blaster 16 or 32 sound cards also ate up cpu.

Amazing how Windows 95 helped fix a lot of that stuff. Somehow, they worked with all the manufacturers and got all kind of software updates/drivers built into the CD-rom so it made things easier.
Click to expand...

I remember spending 2-3 hours trying to get games running in MS-DOS. Hours of tweaking config files and running memmaker. In all seriousness I work in IT today and part of the reason is all the stuff I had to learn back in the day to get PC games working.

I remember downloading a big patch at work and using PKZIP to compress it over 15 3 1/2" disks. It took most of the day to compress, then another day to extract and install at home. You have to laugh a little when people complain about a 10 minute install. :)
 
I recall leaving my Intellivision on for days so I could keep my Astromash game alive because you didn't have game saves. Or having to keep all your sports stats in a spiral notebook because there was no stat tracking. Or reading and rereading game manuals on the crapper because that was the ONLY source for info about the game and often the manuals didn't explain things you needed to know. And the games were still $40-50 a pop if not more.
 
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Yeah I remember when games were $50 while I was making $5.50/hour. Now, that was expensive back in the day. :txbcool:
 
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