Some of the remnants of that hole were flat against the trash fence, held there by heavy winds battering the region: a IRS Form , and a customer registration form from the Townsman motel dated July 3, The stench of decades-old garbage was overpowering. It's actually surprising that people spent decades trying to figure out where Atari hid the cartridges.
As Fuel's Daniel Schechter put it, a lot of signs were pointing toward New Mexico, perhaps none more than a September, , article in The New York Times about Atari burying "14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and other computer equipment at the city landfill in Alamogordo, N.
Then Schechter ran across Lewandowski, a longtime garbage company owner from Alamogordo. On Saturday, with the success of their excavation only barely outdueling his exhaustion, Lewandowski hinted at how much pressure he'd been under, especially when the giant Caterpillar excavator had already dug to its limit of 30 feet, and no games had been found.
The problem, he said, was that time was short -- and the games had been buried in a hole just feet by 40 feet. In the acre landfill. Luckily, when Lewandowski wants something he does what it takes to get it. In this case, once he'd been hired by the production companies, he began calling everyone he could, talking to former truck drivers from the dump, and even listening to stories from people who'd been kids in and said they'd snuck into the landfill and made off with some of the Atari booty.
After all that research, he was pretty sure he knew where to look. But even then, it was risky. As the dig progressed, some on hand were wrestling with how they felt about excavating the games at all. After all, having thousands or millions of E.
If the games were found, that could kill the mystique. Lee was in the pro-discovery camp. All that emotional muddling went out the window at p. One who was no doubt ecstatic to find the games was Andrew Reinhard, the archaeologist hired by the production companies to lead the excavation. Reinhard said the job had been weird -- "excavation in a fishbowl, like golf at the Master's. The remaining games are being held in an archive, and their fates are yet to be determined. She also writes and appears in original videos for NBCNews.
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NBC News Logo. First it was the locals, who when word got out that Atari was dumping lots of cartridges, consoles and computers in their backyard, started sneaking into the dump to pilfer what they could. The hardware may have been crushed beyond use, but many of the games were still salvageable. It was when those games started showing up around town, titles like E.
Pac-Man , and Raiders of the Lost Ark , that the local media picked up on the story. Atari had brought in a security guard to watch over the site to stop the pilfering, but it did little to stop the prying eyes of the media, and by [September 26th] the national press was all over the story.
Around 14 truckloads had been dumped before the PR nightmare was over. Yes, this is the very happening that gave rise to the myth of the supposed dumping of almost 3. Most of the overstock of game cartridges languishing in warehouses around the U. But this occurred in a dump in Sunnyvale [California]. That excavation was scheduled to take place on 26 April and to be open to the public:.
Become a part of gamer history. Unearth the truth behind the ultimate urban legend. Spectators are invited to watch the team uncover the infamous Atari game cartridge grave.
Fuel Entertainment took an interest in the legend, and in December , with help from local garbage contractor Joe Lewandowski, acquired the exclusive rights to excavate the Alamogordo landfill.
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