Famous Atari Landfill To Be Excavated

Thanks to some documentarian film makers, the landfill where Atari dumped 10-20 semi-truckloads of old video games is about to be excavated for the first time.

Let me take you back to 1983. Just a few years earlier, there was a pop culture explosion of video games. Kids would come in masses to the local arcades, just about every pizza place and gas station would have a few video games you could start to play all of your favorite at home, thanks to Atari. The problem with explosions like this, is greedy companies tend to mass-produce and saturate the market with sub-par games. This was the case of E.T. for the Atari 2600. A game many have dubbed the worst video game of all time. Along with bad sales and poor profits, games, systems and other Atari products were buried in a New Mexico landfill.

Now, E.T. is the most known game in this landfill, but several other games that may include pre-production and prototype games could be in there, too. Those games could be worth big bucks today to collectors. It's hard to say in what condition these games will be in after all the time. They could be crushes or blended together with concrete, but the plastic Atari used for their games can take a pretty good beating so I couldn't be surprised if they found a few gems in their dig.

The Canadian film company has six month's worth of access to the burial site. Let's see what they can find.