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The Great Atari Dig
Last time we left Atari facing a seemingly impossible situation, their warehouses were filling up with unsold and returned games and now they had no room for them. With over 2 million E.T., Pacman and Atari 5200s filling their warehouses what could they do?
During the video game crash of 1983 Atari decided to take these unsold games and consoles to desrts across America and bury them thus solving their storage issues. The most famous site was the desert in New Mexico which was dug up on the 26th April 2014. Fourteen trucks were sent to El Paso in New Mexico for the mass burial of 2 million games, consoles and even one the Atari 5200s unique controllers: The Trackball.
How did people know where in New Mexico know where to dig? Especially since it was a highly secretive move by Atari with the burial taking place at night. Due to eye witness reports it became a rumour and what seemed to be just another urban legend. When finally given permission to dig at the site in April 2014, archaeologists could finally reveal that the legend of Atari's mass burial was in fact true.
As for the games, many copies of games like E.T. were sold on online auctions like eBay for several thousands of pounds. Others are being kept for museums all over the world. Even after this monumental find their are still rumours about other burial sites. Not all 2 million games and consoles were found in New Mexico, 2 million is the estimate as that's how many units vanished from Atari warehouses across America overnight. So who knows how many other burial sites there are.
Atari kept this secret (despite it being rumoured) for over 31 years and in that time the industry has vastly changed. Gone are the days that Atari used to hold the monopoly on the home console market. 1983 may have been a disasterous year for Atari but what their future held was to be much more dangerous. With Nintendo and SEGA both announcing their first steps into the home console industry Atari had real competition. What followed is known as the Bit Wars, the prelude to the modern day Console Wars, and this put the final nail in Atari's coffin.
