It was E.T. worst video game of all time? Did that sink the entire video game industry in the early 1980s? Atari buried thousands of copies in a New Mexico desert to cover it? We looked for the old legend and discarded some answers.
Produced through Sarah Wyman and Dan Bobkoff, with Amy Pedulla and Jennifer Sigl.
Note: This transcript may include errors.
DAN BOBKOFF: There’s a legend on a lot in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
HOWARD SCOTT WARSHAW: I really like the legend.
D: They say that if you walk over the sand dunes to a quick position in the desert and start digging, you will become a treasure.
KOB4: ET for Atari so badly that the company tried to dispose of all copies. There are rumors that the trucks in this game were buried in a landfill in Alamogordo in 1983.
D: Atari made a video game based on the movie E.T., and the theory is that the game is so bad … so flawed and cannot be reproduced, that the company ended up with millions of unwanted copies.
KRQE: Legend has it that Atari is desperately able to empty the additional games and consoles of his El Paso factory.
D: But this captured the imagination as Roswell and Area 51.
D: But what happens when you take a shovel and start digging?
From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is the home call. Brands you know, stories you don’t know. I’m Dan Bobkoff.
Today: The legend of the burial of the Atari video.
Atari, the most popular video game company of the 1970s and early 1980s. Then it seemed to collapse overnight.
And that’s where the mystery begins.
Was it all about E.T., the game? The company buried millions of copies in a dumpster? And a lonely man has sunk an entire industry?
We have answers.
Stay with us.
ACT I
D: To solve the mystery of Atari’s lost cartridges, you’ll need to meet Howard Scott Warshaw.
HSW: I say I’m the most productive known user you’ve ever heard of.
D: Howard arrived in Silicon Valley in 1979, fresh out of college. You were assigned a task at HP. And that’s before non-public computers are common.
HSW: You know, I had worked at ARPANET, which then became widely known as the Internet. (laughs) And now I’m not saying it’s Al Gore, I’m just saying I’m there.
D: At HP, Howard and his manager used to play video games to pass the time. Simple games like Yahtzee or car racing… very fundamental things of the 70s … just text messages on one screen. And when he got tired of it, he acted.
HSW: I’d do crazy things. I would do things in my cabin or take list markers and make long chains with them and place them around my bucket.
D: Howard was bored, so he started looking for a stall in paintings as attractive as heArray. And that’s when he found out about life in Atari.
HSW: This is the first time I’ve known Atari likes business. It’s a position someone can move on to work.
D: Atari began in 1972. The component of that first wave of Silicon Valley startups. His first good fortune Pong, which is also the first period of good fortune video games.
But unlike other startups, Atari quickly sold out. Warner Communications acquired the company in 1976. But after the sale, Atari retained his exclusive personality.
D: What did you hear before you went there?
HSW: I heard him crazy.
D: Mm-hmm.
HSW: That’s all I’ve heard.
D: Howard received an interview with Atari. And as soon as they started asking him questions, he knew he was in the right place.
D: This turns out to be a very fast user for the job.
HSW: Yes. Best for that.
D: And yet Atari didn’t mean it, at first. Atari’s recruiting chief called Howard to let him know he hadn’t gotten the job. And, for most people, that would have been the end. But Howard is not the ultimate people.
HSW: I just said, “Look, I think you’d make a big mistake by giving me a chance to come and show you what’s going on.”
D: Howard hung up the phone until the guy presented him with a job.
HSW: Finally, he relented and said, “All right, let’s try. And about a month later, I started, in the early ’81s, I started at Atari. It was this creation, feeling and emotion because the task was to do something new. Usually you know, you have nerds or you have artists. Now you want a nardist, I guess. You want anything that looks like a hybrid of both.
D: No matter what the noses of atari did … or smoked … Worked. In the early 1980s, Atari King … its Atari 2600 formula had about 70% of the market share of home video games. Children and adults took over games like Pac Man …
[PAC MAN SOUND]
Space Invaders…
[SPACE INVADERS SOUND]
Making those games intense.
HSW: There were days when I came home and saw other people escorted. There were days when you came home and saw other people literally taken to psychiatric wards because there were other people who had lost it…
D: Wow.
D: But Howard prospered with Atari. He began scheduling some of the company’s 80s successes. And he’s innovating! He wrote Yars’ Revenge, which he said is the first full-screen video game explosion.
[YARS REVENGE SOUND]
HSW: Yars’ Revenge is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m listed as an exhibitor at the Museum of Modern Art.
D: After Yars’ Revenge, were you a celebrity right now?
HSW: Uh … No, I wouldn’t say I’m a celebrity at the company, but I know.
D: After completing Yar’s Revenge, Howard a new project. Meanwhile, Atari had just signed an agreement with Steven Spielberg to turn Raiders of the Lost Ark into a game.
HSW: I decided as a candidate to do Raiders, but if you go on to Raiders, you’re not just Raiders. What you do is that if you’re moving on to Raiders, if you’re a candidate to do Raiders, then you have to stop by to see Spielberg and Spielberg has to give you approval.
D: So he flew to Los Angeles to meet the only Steven Spielberg. He waited six hours for his only shot to make a good impression. And when he met him, Howard could have been deferential. But it’s not Howard.
HSW: I said, ‘You know, Steven, I have this theory about how you’re an alien yourself. Would you like to pay attention to it? He says, “Of course.”
D: Honestly, I don’t know if Howard is joking … if you really think Spielberg could be an alien. But anyway, that’s what he told him at the assembly where Steven had to if Howard was the guy to play the Raiders game. That if alien beings came to Earth, you know, they’d probably send a complex team. Peacefully prepare humans for their arrival.
HSW: I said, “You know, watch your videos. You are one of the first people to make several videos about how friendly extraterrestrial beings are. They’re other great people we know and there’s no danger, they’re great and we can all get along. And I said, “So it’s pretty cool.” I said, “I think you were like the industry of this complex team. I said, “And your marketing managers, have made sure that the movies have been noticed all over the world in each and every language, in each and every place, is the best way to prepare Earth to meet alien beings. And I said, “By the way, congratulations to your marketing team, I think you’re doing a great job.” I think he loved that. I think he enjoyed it. We said goodbye and that was it, I went back to San Jose and found out the next day that yes, Howard was going to do Raiders.
[RAIDERS SOUND]
D: How much time did you spend with the Raiders?
HSW: I spent months in Raiders.
D: Because nine months is the time it took to create a game at the time.
Raiders a wonderful success. He’s sold a million copies. And at that moment, Spielberg released another hit film.
E.T.: E.T. Landline…
HSW: Then, on July 27, 1982, a date that would live in infamy, I won a call from Ray Kassar that never happens.
D: Ray Kassar, the boss … Atari’s leader.
HSW: He comes and says, ‘Hi Howard, we want E.T. for September 1. It’s July 27th. “In precisely five weeks, we want E.T. Nobody’s played a game in five weeks. Nobody’s played a game in less than five months. He said, “Can you do it? Then I said, “Absolutely I can. Absolutely. There’s no doubt about that.”
ACT II
D: We’re back.
Yar’s Revenge is a success. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a hit. Howard on a high note to Atari.
HSW: The amazing drug in Atari when you can just take your game out, move into a store, see other people betting your game. The latest edition of this is when you see kids fighting for the controller to play your game in the demo. It’s the pinnacle of the top at Atari.
D: Howard had had months to overcome Yars’ Revenge and Raiders. But get the deal for E.T. took a while. Now it’s summer and your bosses are looking for E.T. make in time for the holiday season of grocery shopping. This meant that Howard would only have five weeks to design the game, code it, and send it to production. But Howard isn’t even nervous …
HSW: I needed a challenge. For some reason, I needed to validate myself, get ahead, control myself, just like you wanted. I just needed to do anything I knew was a genuine mountain to climb.
D: So, full of confidence, he does his boss, Ray Kassar.
HSW: It says: “Okay, on Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m., a Learjet will be waiting for you at the San Jose terminal. Participate and we will provide the design to Spielberg. So not only do I have to make a game in five weeks, but I have to design the total game in 36 hours (laughs) and be able to provide this design to Steven Spielberg. I just said, “Great.” Because I’ve never been to a Learjet before, I think it would be great.
D: This time in Spielberg’s office, Howard didn’t accuse him of being a secret alien. He showed her the storyboards he had released in combination in a day and a half.
D: It hadn’t been so difficult for Howard to adapt Raiders to a video game. It’s an action adventure. Suspense and drama have translated well into the plot of a game. But E.T. Different.
HSW: I wanted the game to have emotional sensations and tone. That’s how I left. That’s how crazy I was to think I could do that.
D: Five weeks. Howard didn’t get much sleep. He had installed a paint station in his space so he could continue to code. Someone in the pictures had to remind him to eat.
[E.T. SOUND]
HSW: How do you play E.T.? E.t. with a spaceship that descends and drops you into the woods.
D: You’re E.T. in the game. Friend of E. T., Elliott’s here too.
HSW: There’s Elliott’s house, there’s the FBI building and there’s the clinical institute because those make up the 3 humans that are made up in the game. There’s Elliott, an FBI agent and a scientist.
D: And then there is … Pits. It’s in those wells that you, like E.T., locate some pieces of the phone. Once he put them all together, E.T. I can… call home.
HSW: And that’s how you win the game.
[E.T. SOUND]
E.t. AD: Only from Atari, the video game that E.T. allows you. Go home. Just in time for Christmas.
HSW: Oh, when the game comes out, it’s a phenomenal hit. In December 1982, it was a good time to be Howard. I Yars’ Revenge sells well and comes off the shelves and assailants of the Lost Ark and E.T. are among the six or seven most sensible of Billboard’s most sensible hundred video games.
D: But that was in 1982. There was no Internet. Not E.T. E.t. reaction video on Youtube. No angry Reddit son. No Twitter troll destroys the game. So Howard knew other people were buying the game, but he had no idea if any of those players liked it.
D: When did you realize there was a serious challenge with E.T. And what do you think of that?
HSW: There’s a question about whether I ever knew there was a challenge with E.T. because you have to perceive this for me, E.T. it was a great success. Right? He had delivered the product in this ridiculous time period, came out here, he was doing well on the lists, he was doing well in sales, everything was fine. It wasn’t perfect, but it was actually smart and it was a feat.
D: But in the weeks that followed, something strange happened. The frames passed and passed through the progression zoneArray.
HSW: Every once in a while, someone would come to me and say, “You know something, Howard? We don’t blame you. You came here for us. And I was like, ‘Okay, that’s great.’ I had no idea what they were talking about because they wouldn’t say E.T. or things like that. They were just saying, “You know, nobody blames you, Howard. It’s not up to you. You did it. It was great.’ I say, “That’s good, but what are you talking about?
D: In American households, players unpacked E.T., hitting the cartridge on their Atari 2600 …
[GAME START SOUND]
And then fall into the wells of the ones.
[E.T. SOUND OF FOSOS]
And get there.
HSW: Comeback begins, other people start saying, “Oh, this game sucks. There’s a lot of problems. You’re falling into the pits. Bla, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, ‘
D: Stores were getting tons of returns. Suddenly, things seemed dark. But it’s not just about E. T. The entire video game market was saturated: new corporations entered the games every day and the games they produced were not good. The industry lost millions of dollars in 1983. Thousands of people lost their jobs.
For Atari, things deteriorated temporarily. The company lost about $1 billion in 1983. She evicted her CEO and brought a new one. There have been mass layoffs, unsold video games have been accumulated. Atari is necessarily over.
HSW: He just left.
DB: And there wasn’t a sense, because now there’s this narrative that E.T. is the game that sank Atari, but no one was talking that way then?
HSW: No. Because Atari had just disappeared. People were talking about “Oh, video games are gone.” It’s the hula hoop, it’s the fashion that died. He farts. And that’s the story. People were not led by the reasons for Atari’s failure. People focused on the fact that this astonishing phenomenon of video games had suddenly disappeared. That’s the story.
D: Atari organized the promotion of its leftover game consoles while seeking to expand a non-public computer. Howard remained there until 1984. The company replaced hands and agreed to a dismissal.
HSW: So now I’m in a strange position because I had now discovered the general realization. Professionally, creatively in each and every sense and now it’s over. There would never be another Atari. This would never happen again.
D: Howard a little lost after leaving Atari. He tried to get genuine property but it’s not for him. He worked in commercial robots. He wrote a book, made video production. He tried to move on.
But nearly a decade after leaving Atari, Howard began hearing about E.T. again.
HSW: In 1995, there was a magazine called New Media Magazine and they said ‘E.T. it was what caused the collapse of the video game industry. And so, the rest of the 90s and 2000s and everything else, that was history.
D: And it was in a new thing called the Internet, in the 1990s, that this story took root.
Some other people online have been convinced that not only E.T. The worst video game of all time … not only has it sunk an entire industry … but Atari was so desperate to get rid of the evidence that he had thrown millions of unsold copies of the game into a hole somewhere in New Mexico. .
You can locate old posts on the forum about Atari fans. As there is one in which someone asks: does anyone know “the precise location of the sale full of millions of ATARI games?”
Another replies: “Wasn’t it a hoax?”
Year after year, this idea, this legend has remained. It became an Internet prank. Some YouTube users have even spent 8 years doing a sci-fi parody about it.
PARODY CLIP: I heard that Atari had removed all the cartridges and buried them somewhere in the middle of the desert because the game was so bad.
D: They financed $300,000 to do this.
But other Atari enthusiasts took the legend more seriously. They began to investigate, search files, and perform undeniable calculations. And the more they care about him, the more it’s possible that the legend is true. Like tons of E.T. Game cartridges can be buried in an express landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Coming soon: a documentary team arrives in Alamogordo. And they’re starting to dig.
Stay with us.
ACT III
D: We’re back.
KRQE: Today, Hollywood film crews launched for mass sale in Alamogordo in hopes of finding the highly critical 1982 video game E.T.
KRQE: For video players, it’s a mythical dump. A tomb where an entire industry is almost buried. Now someone needs to dig them up …
ZAK PENN: I’m Zak Penn. I’m a screenwriter, director, occasional manufacturer and rarely actor.
D: And an Atari fan.
ZP: Yes. I like Atari. I really like video games.
D: And it’s because Zak Penn likes Atari who said yes when someone asked him to make a documentary about E.T. and the fall of Atari.
Unlike those on the Internet, Zak is not obsessed with legend.
When Zak was developing, his friend had a copy of E.T. Zak probably would have played it once, but it didn’t make much of an impression on him. But remember how much Atari this huge case and then it’s not.
ZP: Atari has literally disappeared in an almost unsonable way. It would be like Apple just stopped trading, you know, in six months and next year, other people say, ‘Oh, what’s an iMac? That’s nice.’
D: Then, in 2014, after registering to direct the documentary, Zak Penn appeared in a massive sale in the city with a digging team and a lot of expensive digging equipment.
KOB4: Well, today there’s a big dig in that settlement while the video crews filmed to locate the fact once and for all.
ZP: Well, my initial expectations were that it wouldn’t take long, that how hard it would be to dig up a lot of things you know, it’s probably a good opportunity… We probably wouldn’t locate it because, I mean, it’s hard to locate things buried on the ground.
ZP: “Oh, my God, and if we discover the secret,” yet it’s also Array … very fun and banal.
D: And he thought that if his team dug the mass sale and couldn’t find anything, at least they would have forged curtains for a fake documentary. But anyway, Zak didn’t take the legend of Atari’s funeral too seriously.
ZP: What changed, it was all about interviewing Howard Warshaw and that’s when I started knowing how to wait. I would probably have something else on my hands here and I probably wouldn’t want to worry so much about the meta-editing of everything.
HSW: I gave him many hours of gadgets. And then I found out his specialty was making fake documentaries. And I love fake documentaries, but I never sought to be the star. I thought, ‘Damn it. With all the device I gave him, if he wanted to do an axe task or a fake documentary about me, he might do me a mythical task. (laughs)
ZP: When I saw Howard Warsaw and how serious it was for him, you know, the irony disappeared. It wasn’t anymore, you know, it was just authentic. There’s nothing more ironic. Now it’s where we were all literally inverted, we’re looking to locate those games. We need the story, you know, to come to some kind of conclusion.
For Zak, that meant contacting a junk guy named Joe Lewandowski. Joe claimed he had noticed that the funeral took place in 1983. And he had spent years searching to triangulate the precise position of the cartridges. Here’s Zak and Joe in a scene from the documentary “Atari: Game Over.”
JL: This is the place, this road here, this door, this is precisely how the Ataris would have passed.
ZP: So this total domain is where it’s buried?
JL: Some other people don’t think I’m there, but I. That’s all.
D: So all that remains to be excavated.
On the first morning of the search, many Atari enthusiasts appeared to watch.
ZP: First go by, as you may think a secretion doesn’t smell bad. In fact, many other people have described it as the ultimate exclusive bad smell they’ve ever felt. I mean, there’s something wrong with it. It smells a little like garbage, but it’s like trash in the area or something. I don’t know how to describe it Array.. like a burning tire combined with garbage combined with moon rocks or something like that. And you couldn’t get rid of him. Like youArray … I had to wash my shoes five times just to get them back … and put them in a plastic bag.
KRQE: The search for what many call the worst Atari game ever held in a mass sale of New Mexico is in full swing tonight.
D: Howard Scott Warshaw did the California to see this. I was nervous … see its beyond literally unearthed.
D: What’s it like to be there?
HSW: Intense ItArray. It’s very intense to be there. It’s unexpected how attracted to me.
ZP: As you can believe with 500 other people lately and everyone is waiting to see. It was really tense, and then came a sandstorm that was crazy like the White Sands.
MOVIE: Well, now the wind is rising, at the right time!
HSW: It’s just a sandstorm. There’s literally a sandstorm. That huge, terrible sandstorm. It’s brutal.
D: For hours they dug and dug dozens of feet underground. Through the earth, then the concrete layers, they plucked from the garbage. No Atari.
MOVIE: Trash bags, stroh’s beer cans, wood, tons of wood… We’re right about where we need to be, but there’s still no Atari detritus at all.
ZP: There was definitely a fear that we wouldn’t locate the games. Joe was very confident, and I don’t show it in the movie, however, we’re all pretty sure of themselves to know what the games were based on, you know, the … what he had done so far, still then. began to worry that maybe he was digging in the wrong direction.
D: It’s the third day of the excavations. In the afternoon. Archaeologists called Joe and Zak Penn to the excavation site. They showed them anything in a bucket.
ZP: They came here and ‘you have to come and see, you have to come and see’ and there was, you know, the first E.T. cartridge we found.
MOVIE: Can anyone hear me? We found out something. Uh, archaeologists showed it in 1983. 28 feet deep. It’s E.T. Game. Intact. In his box. [applause]
D: Howard is in the crowd, taking everything.
HSW: So, when they found out, it was a very moving moment for me. It started coming in buckets, full claws.
D: There were piles overflowing with crushed cardboard, but the E.T. the cartridges looked new. Atari enthusiasts recorded videos on their phones and took selfies. They covered the line to shake Howard’s hand.
HSW: And at that moment, I found out that this thing I did more than 30 years ago, that little 8K PC code I wrote still … There were lots and lots of other people defying a sandstorm to be in this position for this event. . I learned: “I did everything that created this event. This led me to this delight in which, more than 30 years later, this product that I created still arouses interest, interaction and enthusiasm in other people.
The greatest good fortune I’ve ever had with E.T. probably that moment. The concept that I can still feel that I started something that generated that kind of entertainment and excitement for a lot of people.
D: Then it was true. In a sense. Atari buried things in a mass sale in New Mexico. But after Howard, Zak and the crowd took stock, they learned that it wasn’t compatible with the myth.
But all this raised a question. Why were they buried here in the first place?
ZP: And basically, it was about Array … Burying them was less expensive than destroying them. As a curious thing, it costs much more to incinerate the games than to bury them. And they were regularly buried in Texas. And that’s where they were all stored in a warehouse and the challenge was that there were looters. And they discovered this position in New Mexico that was less expensive. And that was the deciding factor: “What is the cheapest position to bury them and that we also have some coverage of looters?
D: So, the genuine explanation of why the games were buried in Alamogordo less exciting than the legend. But even if Zak and his team didn’t unseverer a massive conspiracy, that moment is still important. He began rewriting the full story about Atari and E.T. And Howard.
ZP: I think for Howard Warshaw, there were all those other people to get his autograph. You know, he’s a guy who left the company and there are all those other people who were like big enthusiasts of him, so for him, the fact that it became a weird birthday party to him and his job, you can believe I mean. , was quite overwhelming for him. And I also think that if you ever stay in a terrible and smelly position for 8 hours (laughs) in the hope of finding something. I mean, you can get a spoon and you’ll get excited when I get off the floor.
D: I sought to know: why were so many people so fascinated with this legend? After all, it was literally the dumpster of a bankrupt business.
ZP: The moment something is buried, there’s something deep in our brain that says, “It’s a secret.” It’s a treasure we want the answer.
D: And now this failure of a gameArray … a treasure. After the excavations, other people sought to buy the E.T. Game. Therefore, the city of Alamogordo sold the cartridges that were retested: there were only about 1,000. One sold for just $1,500. The city pocketed more than $60,000 from the sale.
D: Did you justify it?
HSW: I felt justified. There are a number of things I had cried for with E.T. Some of them were happy, (laughs) brought me enough tension over the years, it also brought me a genuine vision and satisfaction.
D: And Howard’s from E.T. Despite everything, he landed in a new career.
HSW: Well, I’m the Silicon Valley therapist.
D: That’s right. After recovering from job to job, from one industry to another, Howard learned his delight with E.T. it wasn’t unique. Many other people in Silicon Valley are experiencing impressive successes and phenomenal failures… All the time.
HWS: And I’m a very smart user to communicate. When I left Atari, there was a dream of finding a position that would cheer me up and cheer me up again. That’s what I needed to do. I didn’t know how I would do it or where I would and it started as a 20-year trip, looking to locate gratification and fit a therapist every step of the way, what I learned was that it was. This is the first time in almost 3 decades since I left Atari that I locate a task that was also Array … not only as satisfying and satisfying as Atari, but overcomes it. I’m here. It only took about 30 years.
D: Howard Scott Warshaw. You can see the excavation in Zak Penn’s film, Atari: Game Over.
Credits
D: Tell us what you think of the series. Let’s give a review on Apple podcasts. Email us at [email protected]. Follow me on Twitter @danbobkoff or sign up to participate in engaging conversations in our Facebook group.
This episode produced through Sarah Wyman and I with Amy Pedulla and Jennifer Sigl.
Special thanks to Hannah Wall, Jonaki Mehta, Andrew Stelzer and Kew Media International.
Sound and music design through Casey Holford and John DeLore.
Our editor is Gianna Palmer.
The manufacturers are Chris Bannon and I.
The name of the home is Insider Audio.