I wonder if part of one of these shipments made it to Juarez, the city in Mexico right across from El Paso, TX and not too far from New Mexico. One day a truck full of flattened, new Atari game boxes appeared my street.
All the kids around the neighborhood started taking boxes from the truck and someone figured out you could toss the flat boxes like freesbies. We had tons of fun throwing these boxes around and it didn't occur to me how strange it was to find these empty, new boxes until many years later. I couldn't figure out how this truck-full of boxes was on our street. At the time Juarez was a major manufacturer of electronics and other stuff for the US so, in retrospect, it's possible the boxes actually originated from there.
you've opened my eyes to a method of getting quick downvotes when i need them, like for when i try to keep my karma at 666 and some ignorant do-gooder thinks he's doing me a favor by upvoting one of my comments
Back around 2006 a man by the name of Adam Bailey did a pretty in-depth look into the Atari landfill. The site appears to be gone now, but the Wayback Machine looks like it has a full copy.
An excavation should be interesting. There are years of post-Atari dump trash and other material to get through.
In talking to the author back then he said that Atari poured cement on their material in the landfill in 1983, but the landfill was still in use until the until the 90's when the EPA marked the site for hazardous material and shut it down. The landfill was setup before rubber bladders were mandatory and it was leaking into the water table. The protocol for capping a landfill at the time was a thick layer of natural clay with methane vent pipes. After that, at least a foot of dirt is placed on top.
After capping it went on to be used for recreational purposes (ATVs, 4x4s, etc.).
Slightly off-topic, but I am extremely impressed that the New York Times has online archives of their 1983 stories. (I almost wrote "1983 website", but then I caught myself. <:)
Oh man, the Atari 5200. I'd almost forgotten. We didn't have a 2600 but my folks got duped into the 5200 being 'the next big thing'. I guess I should be grateful, without that failure my folks wouldn't of had a reason to buy the Commodore 64 later on which not only had games but also could be used for a lot more.
Also, when talking about E.T. and the landfill you are obliged to link to the music video made by an indie band about the fiasco[1].
It's been YEARS since I've seen that video last. God bless YouTube :-).
A guy named Adam Bailey, who did a pretty good look at the Atari Landfill site in the mid-2000s, approached the band about the video. While the video is cool, it is actually fake. It was filmed in Texas using games with E.T. labels printed for them.
This makes sense, as Atari dumped the games in 1983 but the landfill was in use until the 90's. Any digging should have a fair amount of debris. There is 7 years of trash to get through, not to mention the poured concrete.
I got a copy of E.T. as the chip without a cartridge from my uncle way back in the day. That was one of the most frustrating games I've ever played ... I swear, falling into those pits still haunts me to this day.
While I'm a huge Atari fan and I really want to see what's under the dirt, a small part of me will be sad that this legend will come to an end when I do.
Off-topic, but Alamogordo is a beautiful area. Very close to the White Sands National Monument. If anyone is ever in that area, I'd recommend visiting.
I went there once a few years ago during the summer. It was brutally hot out and dry as hell, but the sand was so cool you could have sworn there was an ice-rink under it or something. Even weirder though, it hurt to stare directly at the sand for too long since it reflected sunlight so well. I expect that you could probably get snow-blindness from staring at it for too long.
It felt like being in a field of gritty snow inside of an oven.
Actually the test was closer Socorro and the small town of San Antonio, NM (birthplace of the Hilton dynasty.) It was on what is now White Sands Missile Range which is very close to Alamogordo, but there is a mountain range between the test site and Alamogordo. The blast was visible from San Antonio though.
I would add that Alamogordo was the fictitious location of the giant ants in the film "Them!"
They open it once a year but you can see the site as you drive by. Very close to the outskirts Socorro, although WSMR is so large it covers both sides of the range if I'm not mistaken.
With the exception of maybe asteroids and pong, pre 8bit NES games pretty much sucked. The control were to unresponsive. I think NES really was the dawn of video games with at least some depth to them.
Donkey Kong and Space Invaders had pre-NES cartridge incarnations as well, I remember them being enjoyable though I honestly don't remember what system I played them on. I know it wasn't Colecovision, either one of the Ataris or Intellivision.
Though I'll agree about the controllers -- though personally I preferred the infamous disk on the Intellivision to even the Atari 2600 joystick so I'm probably biased towards that paradigm anyway. I also enjoyed Treasure of Tarmin far, far more than I had any right to.
I remember Burger Time being fun. As well as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and a game called Utopia, but I was a kid at the time. I may have to try and play them now to re-evaluate.
As a NM resident I might be overly sensitive, but the phrase "across the border in New Mexico," could imply to the misinformed that New Mexico is not part of the US.
I scrolled down to see if someone mentioned what I was thinking. Unearthing electronics made 30+ years ago is not a good idea unless kids in the area have an unusually high rate of birth defects.
I can't imagine the insurance cost for this documentary, if their underwriter even knows what they're doing.
"E.T. Comes Home, Or How We Created A Superfund Site"
All the kids around the neighborhood started taking boxes from the truck and someone figured out you could toss the flat boxes like freesbies. We had tons of fun throwing these boxes around and it didn't occur to me how strange it was to find these empty, new boxes until many years later. I couldn't figure out how this truck-full of boxes was on our street. At the time Juarez was a major manufacturer of electronics and other stuff for the US so, in retrospect, it's possible the boxes actually originated from there.