Alamogordo, New Mexico.
A small town, about 30,000 people.
But it seems to attract more than its fair share
of strange occurrences.
It's right around the corner from where they tested
the first atomic bomb.
It's also the gravesite of Ham, the first chimpanzee
and really the first American to go into space.
And it's the place where this guy broke the land speed record
in a rocket sleigh, which is cool, but also kind of strange.
Despite all of this, the thing that Alamogordo is best known
for is its landfill, the dump, because supposedly,
that's where ATARI buried ET.
The worst video game of all time.
It's been described as the worst video game ever.
ET for ATARI.
Today we're going to talk about the worst of the worst.
Here's our top 10 worst games ever.
ET, the Extraterrestrial.
And here's the thing about ET.
It's widely regarded as the worst video game of all time.
Worst game ever!
We have this myth, or this legend, of something
that happened 40 years ago.
Oh do, doodle, loodle do, do.
Son of a bitch, get out of the fucking hole.
If you grab a piece of the phone,
the FBI agent keeps attacking you.
If you take a step in any direction, you fall into a hole.
And if you get out of the hole, you fall right back down.
One of the major design flaws of the game
was that ET fell into pits.
Damnit! Shit!
Oh, come on!
Well, guess what?
It now lives out it's days in a landfill.
It's rumored that decades ago, truckloads of that game were
dumped in Alamogordo landfill.
The idea that they had so many of these things, and they were
so unable to seldom give them away or whatever,
they literally had to drive them out into the middle
of the desert and bury them like a dead gangster.
Almost too crazy to believe.
I think it's kind of silly, because it's urban legend.
It's just a great story. I think.
I believe that this story endures
because the adults just don't get it.
And that's satisfying to the young people.
Whenever you look at what the reasons are for it,
nothing makes sense.
What drove someone to need to hide this stuff so intensely?
When I was five years old, Pong came out.
And my dad got it for me, my brother, and sister.
When the ATARI 2600 came out...
ATARI!
...I got every cartridge I could get my hands on.
I played it constantly.
ATARI was like Xbox and PlayStation rolled into one.
It had an 80% market share.
And the 2600 was its killer app.
Adventure was probably my favorite game on the 2600.
I spent three weeks sitting in front of my TV.
trying to find the first Easter Egg ever hidden in a video game.
It looks kind of stupid now.
You were just a block, and picked up an invisible dot, and
carried it to a special room to discover the programmer's name.
But to me, finding that hidden screen was like a revelation.
As an adult, I still play a lot of video games.
But I also write and direct movies. That's my job.
I've worked on a lot of big comic book movies,
the kind they make shitty video games out of.
And I even wrote some of the shitty video games.
But I'm also fascinated by myths and urban legends.
In fact, 10 years ago, me and this guy, Werner Hertzog,
went to Scotland to find the Loch Ness Monster.
We never did find Nessy, but I still love an adventure,
especially to unravel an urban legend.
Today, video games are everywhere.
So, it might be hard to understand my generation's
obsession with ATARI.
But for us, it was the gateway drug to a life-long addiction
to video games.
And then one day, it was just gone.
Sometime in the mid '80s, it just disappeared,
and there were no more ATARI games.
And I always wondered what happened.
Where did it go?
So, this is the famous landfill.
Yeah. Burial of the final resting ground of ET.
Yeah, this is the place.
This road here, this gate, this is exactly the way
the ATARIs would have came through.
Through that ditch, and up through here.
It's the only access in.
Back in those days, it was just pure desert.
And is there any way to get through this,
or are we, I mean... Well, yeah, it's a high-security gate, so.
So, duck under it. Yeah, I guess that works.
Joe Lewandowski's been the garbage guru if you will,
for a number of years.
He operated various waste disposal companies with
Alamogordo and Otero country.
And when it comes to the ATARI graveyard, I believe he
probably has more direct knowledge than anybody else.
Joe's the guy that's advising the city
and telling the city where everything is.
And I think that he's the only guy that might be able
to walk out that dump, and point to a spot on the ground,
and say this is where it's at.
So this whole area, this is where it's buried?
Some people don't believe it's there, but trust me, it's there.
You can kind of feel it, right?
Is that just me? That's pretty much you.
It's just me.
So what are these little boxes here?
Each one of the boxes represent where garbage is.
I see. Someone would write down, oh that's where
we put the ATARI trash.
That's where we put, you know- No, that's the problem. Nobody did.
We do today.
Oh, so it's looking for--it's like looking for a haystack
in a pile of haystacks.
Pretty much.
And then looking for the needle inside that haystack.
And finding the needle- So it's two levels.
This picture here is actually out of
an old El Paso Times article.
This is actually that day and that event
of when it actually occurred.
So what we did is just to figure out, okay, if this reporter
took this picture here, then the reporter had to be standing
somewhere in this area.
So, here's the two cells that we pinned it down to now.
So when you come back here, they put the reporter
taking the picture, and you make that line.
And what you're looking for is to make sure the line
intersects with the buildings.
Joe Lewandowski wasn't just a guy
who knew his way around a dump.
He was also an amateur archeologist,
kind of like Indiana Jones.
But without the gun. Or the whip.
See, the newspaper photo was like the medallion, and Joe
had used it to construct his own version of the Staff of Ra.
And that pinpointed the location of the ATARI dump,
which is exactly how Indy would have done it.
Joe was clearly obsessed.
He believed in the legend.
He'd spent over three years constructing a plan to dig up
the landfill and prove it to the world.
But he wasn't a gamer.
He wasn't trying to find out why.
And that's what I wanted to know.
Why would the company I loved so much decide to bury its future?
The whole ET story, is a very small part of the ATARI story.
Let me go back some and explain how ATARI started out.
The video game came because of the convergence of me working
at an amusement park in summers while pursuing
an engineering degree at the University of Utah.
I knew the economics of the coin operated game business.
They made a lot of money.
Nolan designed these incredibly elegant circuits,
put together in a way that's so clever that, you know,
modern engineers have a hard time, you know,
understanding or repairing these things.
My partner and I Ted Dabney, started working on
a ping pong game.
By the end of '72, we did $3.5 million.
And then we did 19 million.
Then we did 35 million.
You know, it was a hockey stick.
This electronic medium which was just beginning,
had some traction with people.
And once you played some of the most sophisticated arcade games
of the day, and understood that maybe there was a chance
you could duplicate that in a home game, your eyes got big.
Home video games have been a success from the moment
a company called ATARI launched this basic game, Pong,
which has been imitated by at least 40 other manufacturers.
They're selling like crazy. 300,000 last year.
This year, 3 million.
Next year, 6, maybe 10, million.
We felt well maybe this is the time to sell
to a company with deep pockets.
I was in my office at Warner in 1976.
The phone rang and it was a guy named Gordy Crawford,
and he asked the question I've never forgotten.
"Would you guys be interested in acquiring a technology-based,
fast-growing entertainment company?"
And I said yes. I didn't know what I said "yes" to,
but I said yes.
And that lead to my introduction to ATARI.
ATARI.
Where the future comes from.
What excited me about ATARI wasn't Pong,
it was the chipset that lead to the ATARI 2600.
Pong was sort of okay.
You bang up and back, and up and back,
but this meant you could constantly change the games.
And that was a very exciting idea to me.
We introduced the 2600 in 1977, with 9 cartridges.
The home video game was a very close approximation
of the coin-op experience.
It changed the mindset of the world.
Turning the television from a passive medium
into an active medium, that was what we knew we were doing,
and that was super exciting to be the pioneers in that field.
It just blew people away.
Nobody knew any of this stuff.
They made it up as they went and they were good at it.
And it started everything.
It was playing those games that taught people
the potential of a computer.
ATARI, at some level,
brought the computer revolution.
They started experimentally hiring smart kids with this idea
that maybe they could come up with other stuff to do.
And they inadvertently were trying to create
the job of game designer.
Microprocessor real-time control programming
is just where it's at.
So there's two kinds of things you could typically do
with that in the early 1980s.
You can do missile guidance systems, or like we say,
kill people for twelve cents a head.
Or, you can make video games, which I thought
was a much better application for the whole thing.
What went on at ATARI from the very beginning was basically
that the engineers are going to drive this company, because
they weren't just engineers, they were creative guys.
They're like musicians, or movie directors, they're artists.
To luck or providence, or both, they ended up
with this department of game designers that became
this dream team at ATARI.
These guys who made all of these classics, Tempest,
and Asteroids, and Centipede, and Gauntlet,
and you know, think of a game.
The culture was these guys do what they want to do.
One day I was standing at the men's room at the urinal.
I looked down, and I saw a pair of bare feet next to me.
And I looked, and here was a guy wearing a pair of shorts,
and nothing else.
And I said something, and they said,
oh yeah, that's so-and-so, he's a great engineer.
He doesn't like to wear clothes.
The coin-op engineers at ATARI, they were great.
And, on the consumer side,
Howard was one of the best programmers.
He was one of the best of those engineers.
At the heart of the creative process is the programmer.
I try to create basically a sensory experience that evokes
a certain feeling in the user.
I mean, I tend to program from a concept.
I mean, it was--I was made for this.
I mean, this was what I was made to do.
January 11, 1981, I showed up for my first day of work
as a game programmer at ATARI.
So, do you remember the first day you showed up here?
Absolutely.
My first office mates were Tod Frye and Rob Zdybel.
And I had an understanding that there was a lot of dope
that was smoked at ATARI when we were there.
And so on my first day at work, I brought a joint because
I didn't want to be, you know, I wanted to be a courteous guest.
And so I showed them... Which by the way, it is a good lesson for our younger viewers.
If people are doing drugs, bring your own so you fit in.
Todd walks in, shuts the door, and says,
"I'm going to get high in here, so if you don't want
to be around this, you'd better leave."
No, actually here, I said. I brought a joint.
And he sort of looked and he went pfft.
I'm going to smoke some real stuff.
Okay.
That was my introduction. That was my first day at work.
We wanted people who worked hard and yet had fun with doing it.
How do we mix up so that we don't know the difference
between our work and our play?
The company's motto was we take fun seriously,
but we used to say, we take fun intravenously.
And they didn't like that very much.
No, I don't know why.
The party atmosphere was actually...
A calculated plan to incentivize.
I would set quotas.
If the quotas were met, I'd throw a kegger.
They would just roll out in the car, go to a liquor store,
and they gave someone a company credit card,
and they came back with a bunch of booze.
And we consumed it.
Over there's where the hot tub was, inside on the first floor.
There was some great stuff that went on in that room.
Over here, here's the hill that, you know, one day I was wearing
dashiki shirt which I was very into back then,
and I would do somersaults down the hill.
I might have had some cocktails that afternoon at that point.
Did you know that you were entering
this crazy party atmosphere?
That you'd be... No. Even though I was told I was,
I had no expectation that it could really exist.
The best recruiting tool we could have for an engineer
was to bring him over to one of our parties.
Hey, what's happening people?
Hey, how's it going?
What's happening?
And they felt, hey, I'm a nerd.
There are girls here, they're talking to me. It's good.
That was the culture.
These guys are the lifeblood of the business,
and they do what they want to do.
And that's fine.
And some of these things happened to be over the course
of 3.5 years here that made the next 25 years really tough.
Because it established a standard of what
professional life and life in general could be.
And I never let go of the thought that my life
could still be this or better.
I just didn't know how to do it.
It's really intense for me to come back here.
This is the first time I've been back here in 30 years.
And, this was the place where I was introduced
to what life could be for me.
What a working life could be.
What real creative satisfaction could be.
What doing something really meaningful could be.
Those are all things that come back to me in this moment.
It's just very intense.
So what really happened back in 1983?
People heard the rumors, but ATARI denied
the dump every took place.
And eventually people forgot about it.
But with the growth of the internet,
and all of its best and worst lists, ET and its burial
went from small-town gossip to full-blown urban legend.
By the mid-'90s, videos began to appear online that seemed
to suggest that anyone with a shovel could go out
in the desert and dig up the buried games.
That's what I thought, too, but it wasn't close to that easy.
Joe had spent years researching the burial.
If his information was correct, the games were not only
deep underground, they were covered with concrete.
Joe was still waiting for a sea of red tape,
but if and when the city approved his plan
to excavate the landfill, he was going to need more
than just a shovel.
He would need giant, yellow digging machines,
and a bunch of guys in hats and vests to operate them.
This is one of the photos of the actual burial when they did.
So we're looking at like 15 feet down to hit the concrete.
Under the concrete's mostly dirt.
It's just the-- it's a bottom of the pit.
What's that thing right over there?
That's a motor grader.
A motor grader? Yes.
That's for really just fine grading, you know,
like the highways and roads.
And fine planing large areas.
So, we conceivably might need that for this, right?
No. No. No.
I mean, but you might,
you could bring it out before, right?
I mean, you might want to park it there so it's ready?
No. Not really.
Oh. No.
I don't know. Not my field.
I am concerned that Joe's moving kind of quick,
and we do need to throw some brakes on and slow it down.
The opposition comes from environmentalists,
maybe within the community.
And the concern is that Alamogordo also may have
something else buried in the landfill that may be hazardous.
And we may not know exactly where this location is.
Nobody really and truly has dead-honest records
as to where everything is buried out there,
and we're talking potential mercury-laced pigs.
Malathion. Possibly DDT.
There's potentially lead in there.
Maybe some other dangerous metals
that are in those cartridges.
I don't want to be in an area where we might crack open
a sealed tomb, so to speak, of these hogs,
where mercury gas comes out.
So, I don't want the Stephen King novel of we hit the
wrong spot and all of a sudden we are evacuating Alamogordo.
That is unacceptable to me.
If there's a problem that the
New Mexico Environmental Department perceives,
we're not going to be able to proceed.
Until I'm satisfied it's safe, it's not going to happen.
At least within my power.
You know, there's only so much power that I have.
So, for my first game, they wanted me
to do a coin-op conversion.
Although I'd only been there for about a week,
I went to my manager and I said, "You know something?"
I said, "This game, Star Castle, on the 2600,
is just going to suck. I know it's going to suck."
And I said, "But I think I can take some of the key things
that I think make it a fun game, and rework it
so that it would work on the 2600.
And so they said, "Okay, go ahead.
Do what you want to do."
So how did you learn how to program a game?
I just read the manual and started writing the game.
No one had ever done like a back story for a game before.
And I thought, this is my first game.
I want to be involved in every part of it.
I want to make it the best thing it could possibly be.
So I wrote this, like, seven, eight page story.
I stayed up all night just writing this story,
knocked it out.
And it was a science fiction story about flies that get on
the first interstellar space ships, and mutate, evolve,
and take over the solar system.
But now they're under attack by this other monster and stuff.
And that's the short version of the story.
So I thought well, I need to name it.
So what I did was I named it YAR,
because that's RAY spelled backwards.
And Ray Kassar was the CEO of ATARI.
Right. So I've got his name
keyed into the type, and I thought revenge,
great action word, you know, so that's compelling.
And so that's how it became Yar's Revenge.
When Yar's Revenge came out, it was a hit.
It was huge.
Games that could look like Yar's Revenge looked,
that could draw that kind of stuff, were like magical.
Even though Yar's Revenge might look primitive, you know,
it looks like the super-connecting, supercollider
compared to a lot of the games that were out there at the time.
I remember the first time I put the cartridge in.
I was like, what it this?
It really is a very innovative shooter of that era.
Getting a ship to fly around so it's fun just to
fly the ship around is a trick, especially in that hardware.
The enemy was cool and scary,
and it felt really good to defeat it.
You feel like it's your victory when you beat those challenges.
And you feel like it's your defeat when they beat you.
And you'll keep coming back
because you didn't lose by being cheated.
You didn't lose because the game did something unfair.
You lost because you weren't quite good enough.
And all of the great games sit right on that edge.
I remember playing Yar's Revenge one day, and we happened
on this trick that lets you--if you were on this right spot
at the right time in the game, you know, it was between levels,
these initials came up.
These initials were HSW.
To us, it was some weird mystery,
like we had to find out what HSW meant.
And finally in one of the game magazines,
they published what HSW meant.
And it turns out HSW means Howard Scott Warshaw,
the guy who made the game.
Yar's Revenge was the first game that ATARI ever did where
the programmer's name went out with the cartridge.
Yar's Revenge had a lot of firsts,
and that was just one of them.
Yar's Revenge is the best-selling original game
for the ATARI 2600.
It sold something like a million copies.
Every reviewer at the time thought Yar's Revenge
was one of the best games ATARI put out.
You know it made a lot of money for ATARI.
In 1981, this is a company that made operating profits
of something like $375 million.
One of today's greatest marketing triumphs
in the entertainment field is video games.
It was beyond comprehension.
The fastest-growing company in American history.
This was an explosion.
Even those of us who were right in the middle of it, we were
shaking our heads, going, oh, my God, this is amazing.
We were the most successful coin-op company.
We were the dominant consumer company.
And we sat around literally saying to ourselves,
what are the categories of games?
What are the capabilities of the 2600?
Where's this industry going?
Everything that Joe has put together on this
ATARI graveyard, so far, seems to be coming true.
I'm in favor of the ATARI games being dug up
because it is the largest myth in the gaming world.
I believe that Joe just thinks that
it'd be an outstanding event for Alamogordo.
And a way to get us on the map.
On Tuesday, Alamogordo's city commission approved a deal
to dig in the old landfill within the next six months.
The city has given it's okay,
and now the state has given them approval.
Film crews will be in Alamogordo.
The documentary film crew will start probing the dump
for their strange buried treasure at 9:30am.
So, this is an impressive- looking machine out here.
What the hell is it doing?
What this drilling rig does, goes down,
straight down, takes out core samples,
and brings up whatever's in the ground.
We've narrowed it down from 300 acres down
to about five to 10 acres.
And so what we're doing now is trying to get it even closer,
because we're looking for things like somebody's mail,
you know, the postmarks. Newspapers. Things like that.
Looking for dates. And we're looking for September of '83.
Don't you think people are going to be disappointed
if we dig it up and we don't actually find the ET games?
I mean, wouldn't that be...
That'd be very disappointing for all of us.
All the work. Three years of work put into this.
So what do we do then?
You're just going to dig up the whole landfill or something?
No, we can't--the environmental department
will not allow that to happen.
You're saying that there's a possibility that this could
turn out to be a giant waste of time.
I think I said it before.
I'll be the car, I won't bet the house.
Most everybody, at least in the Western World,
has played a video game of some kind.
They've gone to an arcade. They know the ATARI brand.
They certainly know ET.
And so I think there's a universal curiosity
about this game.
You know, something did happen those couple of nights in 1983
that I think it merits serious investigation.
So why did I decide to go to Alamogordo?
I'm very much interested in the impact that a particular game
or industry has made within a cultural and social context.
What's striking about the ATARI ET game,
in the Alamogordo landfill is that
they're there and not in museums.
I think this is what excites many people who keep
this narrative alive, is they want to get these items.
They want visible proof.
They want some kind of tangible evidence
that that dump did take place.
I've been professionally making games since about '94,
but more than that, I'm somebody who's been chiefly doing
a lot of historical work with video games,
trying to preserve video games, and get people to understand
that video games are more like art.
And so I've been doing a lot of
video game preservation and education.
I always thought one day I'm going to get over there
and I'm going to see, finally, once and for all,
like, where it's buried.
I almost don't even really need to know what's in it.
I almost want to keep that mystery alive.
To me, under that landfill is actually the burial site
of an entire industry.
Because what affected ATARI at the time affected everyone.
And, everything that I thought was going
to go on forever stopped.
And it stopped almost at that same moment
that these-- whatever's there was buried.
So, for me, I want to find out what is there.
It's like opening the Ark of the Covenant.
It's like, you kind of want to look,
but is my face going to melt off? I don't know.
I've told my wife that I will be going to New Mexico.
And she asked me why. And I started to explain.
And she said, "I don't need to know. Just go do it."
You want it, Ernest, on screen?
Whatever. Ernest is my fancy writer's name.
Ernie's what everybody calls me.
Well, actually, all right. So we'll use your writer's name.
How would you describe yourself?
Screenwriter, novelist. Gentleman adventurer.
The thing about having an ATARI for me was it was a simulator.
Like I could simulate being Indiana Jones,
or simulate being ET.
Having access to that and coming from a family
of like modest means, and not having to, you know,
beg for quarters and just being able to play
as much as you wanted, that was such a huge part
of my childhood and fed my imagination.
And that was the inspiration for Ready Player One, my novel.
The idea of like what if Willie Wonka had been
a video game designer, and he held his golden ticket contest
inside his greatest video game creation.
That all came from finding those Easter eggs
in all those ATARI games.
I felt like a little kid this past week.
Like, getting ready to go to camp.
Alamogordo and the ATARI graveyard.
For me, it's like holy ground.
And that's when I realized my DeLorean's
already in New Mexico.
I just have to fly to Santa Fe,
pick up my DeLorean from George R. Martin.
He was using it for the Back to the Future screening.
Drive it down to Alamogordo.
I could stop at the Very Large Array.
Also hit Roswell.
And then go to Alamogordo and be there for the excavation
of the ATARI graveyard.
As soon as those, you know, tumblers clicked into place,
I'm like the most epic road trip of all time.
I have to go.
It's like I'm Indy going to Westoros...
To meet Doc Brown... And then save E.T.
George, thank you so much, I appreciate it, man.
My pleasure.
Right there. There it is.
This is a good piece of evidence, because right here...
Is that the date right there?
Right there.
You got Sunday, October 2, 1983 right there.
That's good, right? Yeah.
ATARI was from the 23rd to the 29th of September.
So this is like a week later.
No, it's not even a week.
It's like two or three days later.
Well, I'm not that good at math.
The ATARIs would have been on the bottom, then garbage
from the following weeks would have been piled on top. Right.
This is the following week. In here. So where are the games?
No games, no ATARI stuff at all? No, not yet. Not yet.
Okay.
I love the challenges.
I love the mystery.
I love the--especially when people say they'll never
be found, or they're not there,
that just makes the challenge even better.
I put three or four years of this research planning,
the politics,
the environment department.
I mean, many, many, many things to get to this point.
Yeah, now, it's very important that we find them.
So, back in the early '80s, movie licenses for video games
were just starting to come into vogue
and I think Raiders was the first one.
So they needed someone to do Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I think what happened was Yars was very successful,
and so they wanted me to do a big game.
And then it was up to Spielberg.
So, when I went down and met with Spielberg, and if Spielberg
would have said, you know, "I don't think he's really right
for the game," they would have sent someone else.
Can Indiana Jones escape from the forces of evil?
In ATARIs Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure game.
What was the reception of the Raiders of the Lost Ark game?
It was another million seller.
Raiders was huge.
I mean, I can honestly say I'm the only programmer
in the history of ATARI where every one of my games
that was released was a million seller.
The word meteoric comes to mind.
And now, Stephen Spielberg brings us E.T.
The Extra-Terrestrial.
Spielberg says, well, you know, my pictures, they open slow.
And, they build, and they hold, and da-da-da-da-da-da,
and I just looked at him and I didn't know anything.
I said, not this one.
It was ET.
I said, it's going to open huge and it's going to stay huge.
Okay, the movie comes out. It's a huge hit.
And we want to do the cartridge of it. Okay.
You know, every time you try to take some kind of a property
and move it into another medium for a pure profit motive,
you get trouble.
Specifically, with respect to games,
you know, it's like, let's go see if we can
exploit this movie as a game.
You know, maybe we could make extra money
out of a profitable franchise.
Now, there was a negotiation going on between
the ATARI people and the people at Universal
about what we're going to pay,
and Steve Ross who was the CEO of Warner,
got in and for whatever the reasons, he agrees to a deal
that is so off the chart, nobody believes it.
But he does it. It was $20-30 million.
It was some crazy number.
Steve Ross basically was trying to woo Stephen Spielberg
to come to work for Warner because he recognized
that Spielberg was a genius.
And, that all plays into this story.
Well, we acquired the rights to ET.
And it was--we had to have the game out for Christmas.
And that's a problem.
One afternoon, I'm sitting in my office, and a call comes in.
[phone ringing]
And it's Ray Kassar. And he's calling from Monterey.
So I take the call, and Ray Kassar comes on the phone,
and he says, "Howard, can you do ET in five weeks?"
And I said, "Yes, I can." And he goes, "Okay.
In two days, I want you to be in San Jose Executive Airport.
There'll be a Lear jet waiting for you.
Be on that jet.
Be ready to propose the game to Spielberg."
[dial tone]
During that meeting, when I flew down on the Lear jet
to go meet Spielberg, and present the game to him,
even though I only had five weeks,
I still wanted to innovate.
So I proposed a 3D world that the game
was going to take place in.
And the huge scope of what I was trying to achieve.
It walks that line between really trying to make
something happen, and venturing into the impossible.
And walking off a cliff.
The emotionality of the game was supposed to come out through
the interaction of the characters.
You have the FBI agent, who's interested in what you have,
that's why the FBI agent just steals stuff
that you were holding.
You have this scientist who's interested in who you are.
The scientist actually carries you back to the city,
because they want to study you.
And Elliott comes in to save you.
There's time where you can call Elliott
and he will help you out.
And so those are the kind of things that I had that
I thought created possibly some sentiment, but.
And at one point, Spielberg says to me, he goes,
"you know, couldn't you do something more like Pac Man?"
No, Steven, we need to do a game that's fresh.
We need to do something that's really worthy of this movie.
Simply how you can make a complicated game.
It's how complicated a game can you make subject
to the constraint of easy learnability.
My job is to produce a cartridge that is going to sell for ATARI.
A typical VCS game at the time took five or six months.
And this was going to be in five weeks.
You might think, no, nobody can do a game in five weeks.
Like most people in the department would think.
But I don't think that way.
I think yeah, I can do that.
The word hubris comes to mind.
I mean, whatever it is I might have been full of,
I was overflowing with it at that point.
Because if the game can't make the Christmas market,
the game is a total waste.
They're going to miss their window.
So that was the big thing.
It was the $22 million bet, that you could
turn the game around in that time.
I had a development station moved into my home so I could
be basically working on this game almost 24 hours.
We found that there was a good probability of success
if we took a coin operated game and just ported it over
to a game that we could play on the VCS.
ET didn't have that.
Hello?
Somebody out there?
ET?
The video game?
Wow.
It's the video game that lets you pretend you're ET.
Okay. So the game's done, and one of the
conditions I asked for was that Steven Spielberg is the one
who approves the final game.
So, Steven Spielberg played the final game
and approved it for release.
Howard, who is a certifiable genius, went off
and about a number of weeks later,
came back with a concept and a game plan.
And I was amazed at how difficult it was,
yet at the same time, how much fun it was to play.
I've seen the final game.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's my favorite.
Of course, I'm biased. I made the movie.
So, Steven Spielberg thought it was okay.
So I thought, all right. I'm good with that.
And...
Not that I'm blaming him for anything.
No, of course not.
But...
But it's his fault.
The video game that lets you help ET get home.
Just in time for Christmas.
After ET was released there was a great sense of relief
that we'd actually made the schedule.
And everything was good.
And then the game went out into market,
and it was very high on the billboard list.
And again, things were good.
I got ET, I think it was Christmas of 1982,
if I remember correctly.
And I thought it was like I was going to be the guy
on the street who had ET before everybody else.
Turns out everybody I knew got ET that Christmas.
After a while, people start going by me in the halls,
people from other buildings, people from marketing,
and management, and they're saying things like,
you know something, Howard?
You did a great job. We don't blame you.
That was really something what you did.
You really came through for us there.
And we don't want you to think we think anything else.
This really isn't about you.
Don't feel bad. It's okay. It's cool.
I'm going like what the hell are they talking about?
ET was a really hard game.
It was the kind of game that was brutal, unfair,
didn't make a lot of sense.
I grew up in London and there was a video game store
in my town that let you rent them.
I don't know what the rental was,
like 50 pence for a weekend.
But I still remember feeling like I wasted my money,
because it just--it was bad.
People aren't liking it. And people aren't like it a lot.
And what made it particularly bad
was my memory of the movie was so great.
I loved the movie. Everyone loved the movie
when it came out. It's a great movie.
Still is a classic movie today.
And so this massive chasm existed between the quality
of the movie and the quality of the game that it was based on,
I think just made it seem that much more like
a slap in the face.
Okay, well, maybe it won't sell six million,
maybe it'll only sell four million or three million.
That'll be okay. And then there's like returns.
People are returning the game.
They made too many. How many they made, I don't even know.
They made like 4 million cartridges.
That means there could be millions of carts coming back.
So what do you do with useless, worthless product?
How do you get rid of it?
Bury it.
That's a pretty good answer.
Well, a career change is not anything new for me.
I've been through a number of different careers.
I actually went and got a California Real Estate license
and then a broker's license.
And I did that for a while.
And I did that just long enough to know this was like
the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
And now, I am a licensed practicing
psychotherapist in California.
And, I'm a very unique therapist in that I have
a Masters in Engineering, and I also have
a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology.
I mean, I'm the Silicon Valley therapist.
I'm very good at translating between English and Nerd,
and this is the first time since I left ATARI,
that I feel I'm doing what I really love doing.
So, it took me 30 years to get back to a place
that I don't feel I'm a step down from where I used to work.
And that's many, many different jobs.
I know this dig is coming up, and I'm going to be there.
I'm going to be standing right there.
And I'm going to literally watch my past being dug up.
And that's a weird kind of thing to anticipate.
My hopes are one way and my expectations are another.
And I don't know what it's going to be.
I really don't know what it's going to be.
I don't know what it's going to mean to me when,
if something comes up. If it's there.
Part of punk archaeology is that sense of community,
and the fact that we're helping each other out
to address the issues that we're interested in.
And most of the time we're doing it on a volunteer basis.
It's going to be interesting to see how they decide
to excavate in order to clear a better area, you know,
so that we can get at more of the content that we need.
One of the people down there did confirm
finding a Donny and Marie poster.
Yeah, yeah, which is awesome.
Well, basically because we're going to treat this
as a salvage excavation, we will dig a trench.
We'll go through and excavate the material in the pits that
we dig, at which point we'll send them up to the tables,
we'll sort through the material, we'll weigh it, we'll count it,
identify it, and you know, that's the plan.
So what's happened so far today?
Basically we've started digging on the hole, and the trucks
have already started going through the train.
So just so people understand and probably right now
I'm cutting to an awesome diagram of this.
There's like 20 feet of garbage that's on the top
of wherever the games are buried.
Garbage and dirt. Sorry, garbage and dirt. Right.
In the diagram, it's going to be pretty clear.
And so that all has to be taken away.
Right. Yeah.
We'll get the vast majority of the hole excavated out.
And so far have we found anything?
Found any ATARI games or?
No, nothing. Nothing yet.
And Son, I mean, you seem pretty nervous.
Right.
Are you?
Oh yeah. Terrified.
Terrified. Okay.
Um, I've got to be honest.
I'm nervous as shit.
I don't know if that'll help motivate you guys, but.
Yeah, that did it for us.
Yeah. We need to get back to work, yeah.
Great, let's go. Go team. Way to go.
Son, calm down, buddy.
People say nerd or geek.
I say enthusiast.
I love things.
And I love people who love things.
Like, if you just spend all your time focusing on all the amazing
like art and entertainment that's being made,
there's so much of it happening now,
you can't even take it all in.
It's like the dig.
When I tell people, the right kind of people, about it,
they're like, I can't believe that's finally happening,
and that you're going to get to be there.
You know, I get--look, goosebumps.
Goosebumps. Talking about it.
Local video game shop in Austin, Texas, Game Over Video Games,
they gave me every copy they had of every one of Howard's games.
Little known fact.
ET has the very first official video game Easter egg,
ever in a video game.
Warren Robinett had the very first one in Adventure,
but he did that without anybody knowing.
Howard asked if he could put Easter eggs in the game,
and ATARI said yes.
If you go find the geranium
and you make the geranium regenerate,
it turns into Yar from Yar's Revenge.
And he flies away.
First time that happened to me when I was 11 years old,
I shit myself. And then if you do it again,
it turns into Indy from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
So Howard hid characters from this game
and this game in this game.
Hello. Hi.
Good afternoon, and welcome to The Lodge.
Well, it's great to see you. Are you guys just checking in?
Absolutely.
Great. Can I get the last name?
Warshaw. W-A-R-S-H-A-W.
Howard.
That's me.
So it's the day of the actual dig, and my wife and I
are in a van on our way to the landfill.
It was a strange feeling.
I mean, I was like nervous, and I didn't really understand why.
But I just had this sense, just like a tingly thing,
that something is going on here today.
And as we pull into the landfill,
there are already people there.
And then there's more people.
And we go on, and there's more people.
And it just keeps going and going.
This just sort of felt like a religious pilgrimage to me.
Called up some friends, said, hey, can we get down there?
I asked my brother in law if he wanted to go.
Heck, let's do this. Check it out.
And my wife, said, whatever.
It's one of those weird monumental video game-based
events that only comes around once a century.
This is our generations urban legend.
Billions of cartridges out in the desert.
Growing up, you always read the little rumors about it.
I grew up playing an ATARI,
which my babysitters had given me.
And I actually had the ET game.
My friend and I, she and I would actually just for fun
on the weekends, drive around trying to figure out
where would these ATARI games be buried.
The fun of the legend.
It's like looking for the Loch Ness monster.
What did you think when you played the ET game last night?
It was awesome.
Because in my opinion, I like terrible games.
They come back and relive the feeling I got off those games
is something I couldn't pass up.
I just want to know about the urban myth,
see if it's really buried out here.
I just came out here to be part of video game history.
Had to see whether it's true or not.
You have to be a special kind of nerd to be able
to want to drive 28 hours for a video game.
The myth that ET the video game for the ATARI 2600 was
the worst video game of all time, it would be so great
to debunk that, because it's just not true.
And also to redeem Howard Scott Warshaw, because he's an amazing
video game designer and his game was great.
Cool car.
Yeah, I like that.
ET's in there.
This morning, coming to a dump in a small town in New Mexico,
there were people lined up waiting to get in.
When's the last time you saw a line of people
waiting to get into a dump?
It totally took me by surprise, but in a delightful way.
You never go to a dump, unless you're throwing something away.
And here we are, trying to find treasure, buried treasure.
I think they'll find something.
The cartridges had to go somewhere.
Why not here?
It is a lot of open space.
Great place to dump a million cartridges.
There's a definite possibility that there is games.
This is archaeology for the time I grew up.
So nostalgia that came out of that era is pretty high.
[wind howling]
Now the wind is really picking up.
On cue.
The weather here in Alamogordo is awesome,
if you like sandstorms,
and an impending doom-filled cloud of white.
[wind howling]
Whoa!
Oh, this is getting brutal.
Yeah. Sorry.
This is brutal. It's getting very windy--
Basically what's happening is the white sands are blowing in
from white sands, and covering everything,
and it's really shitty.
Just think, this is like a historic wind today. Really?
That's what somebody told us.
To think that we're in the middle of a sand storm.
Really? This is what's going on?
And for me, it was almost like the big sandstorm
right at the opening of Close Encounters,
and the people were wearing the goggles and their bandanas.
Everybody's like gather around, because they found something
and they can't believe what they found.
Are we the first?
This is Tony Johnson from Denver, Colorado,
who ran up to me in my glory.
He's like, I found something! I found something!
And Tony, it's going to go down in history,
because he found the first evidence of ATARI hardware.
Whoa! Whoa! That's pretty neat. Right there it is, my man.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have an announcement.
So, Tony, tell us what you just found.
An ATARI 2600 joystick top.
[cheers/applause]
So, Tony, where did you find it?
Walking to the bathroom.
[laughter]
So it was a surface find?
Surface find.
Yeah, like we know what a surface find, right?
Well, surface find is just something
that you're walking around,
you're looking down at the ground,
you see something interesting, you pick it up.
It's totally out of archaeological context.
What are the odds that that like blew out of the hole?
Actually, I think that's pretty good.
I mean, the wind is blowing fiercely in that direction.
You know, the stuff's coming out of the bucket.
You know, we've been finding a lot of interesting things
that date from around that time.
Anything from ATARI?
Nothing from ATARI yet.
How can you authenticate this?
Can you carbon date it?
[laughs] No, it's much too recent for that.
There are really two things that we could be dealing with
when taking a look at these cartridges,
if they're actually there.
First thing is that they just loaded the trucks
with these cartridges and then they dumped them.
And that's the best possible scenario,
because you can pull them out,
and I'll bet you most of them will be playable.
You know, they've just been in there since 1983.
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.
We've been here for a while already.
It's tedious.
The wind's horrible.
We're wondering if they're going to find anything or not.
I don't think there's anything in that hole
except rattlesnakes and scorpions.
If it's buried, it's probably for a reason.
It should stay buried.
I wasn't thinking that something was
really messed up until late '83.
To me, ATARI was never going to go away.
It was this thing that was just part of my life.
And the thought that there could ever be a day where
there was no ATARI or no ATARI 2600 never crossed my mind.
ET comes out and ET is not so great.
And somewhere toward the end of the year,
I'm starting to wonder, are we making our numbers,
which leads to one of the worst nights of my life.
On December 7, 1982, I get a call from Dennis Groth,
who was the CFO of ATARI.
And he says, "Manny, here's the new budget."
And it's a huge shortfall from what we'd been told.
Warner Communications said today that it's once
booming ATARI business lost another $180 million
in the third quarter for total losses this year
of more than half a billion dollars.
I was starting to see enough signs in the company
that things were starting to unravel.
It was unraveling hard and fast.
And we didn't have any ready solutions.
Several ATARI executives, including ATARIs Chairman,
Raymond Kassar, sold Warner stock shortly
before the negative earnings announcement,
and the decline in the price of the stock.
Kassar denies any wrongdoing or impropriety,
but a number of stockholders have sued Warner.
So they got rid of Ray Kassar, and they brought in a guy
from Phillip Morris, and when he came in,
ATARI had 10,000 employees.
And within about four months or five months,
ATARI had 2,000 employees.
I really got that we had lost 80% of our staff.
In the short run, the market is frequently irrational.
In the longer run, hopefully it's rational.
The wild upside ride was over.
I did not understand the extent of the downside ride
that was coming.
This is slipping away.
The train is derailing.
It's not going to keep riding.
And what am I going to do next?
It was a big emotional blow.
It was my baby.
And I hated to see it abused.
New Media Magazine credited ET with destroying
the video game industry.
That's interesting.
I think that's really interesting that I could be
single-handedly responsible for toppling
a billion dollar industry.
ET comes out, the industry dies, Howard's associated with that.
And I think that's affected his career
and what people will remember him for.
And that's pretty bad.
The fact that a guy's career got destroyed because he did ET,
given the circumstances surrounding doing ET is--
it's completely unfair. I mean, it's sad.
That's really sad.
There's this video game walk of fame, there's also this show
called Dice where they give out lifetime achievement awards.
Howard's not in that.
He's not put in that same group.
They kind of keep him out of all these things,
and it's kind of a shame.
The day I left ATARI, when things really fell apart
and it was over, and I'm literally carrying
my garbage out to my car to leave for the last time...
That was a very depressing moment for me.
Because I felt I was losing the most important thing in my life.
And, I also knew it was so unreal
that I'd never be able to recreate it.
The burial in Alamogordo is basically ATARI's funeral.
The burial of those cartridges represents the burial
of that beautiful era.
And that may be what's interesting about it.
I don't know.
I mean, that's a whole psychology
I'm not going to go near.
But it may be because it is about the death of ATARI.
That's what it is.
We can't control how the past returns to us.
We may get something that
no longer resembles an ET cartridge.
We may get something monstrous,
something twisted, something decayed.
We may not even know what we're looking at
if we unearth ATARI's ET.
Part of me feels that when you finally crack open this place,
and you start to look, it's going to be a lot
like the Ark of the Covenant,
it's just going to be a bunch of sand.
But...
Another part of me hopes that what's found there
is going to lead to a lot more understanding
and a lot more discovery about what really happened.
Shit.
Do you see what I see?
What's his name?
Joe!
What's that? What is that right there?
They want me to come in?
Let's go.
So what's up?
Did you guys find anything?
I should have brought my binoculars.
Can you show me?
They're bringing some stuff over
to the archaeologists table right now.
Let's see what's going on.
Can everybody hear me?
We found something.
The archaeologists have confirmed from 1983,
28 feet down...
It's ET, the video game.
Intact. In the box.
[applause/cheers]
It's an emotional event.
They backed up this legend with fact.
And it's incredible to be a part of it.
Good job, Joe!
I wasn't nervous until we got down to that
where he was almost reaching his max length.
But yeah, it was a big weight off my shoulders
when that bucket came up.
And ET was there.
Congratulations to you.
Thank you.
I didn't think you were going to find them intact.
I thought for sure they'd be crushed and ruined,
but now I've got goosebumps.
And it's not because of the dust storms.
What's this moment like for you?
Look at all the excitement that's being generated today
over something I did 32 years ago.
It's just...
It's an immensely personal thing.
What it took to make these games...
Was a lot.
And this one was done in five weeks.
That was--was the hardest five weeks of my life.
So I need a little moment.
I'm just so excited to be here.
A lot of these people who were complaining about ET
had never even actually played it.
And ever since then, I would talk to people,
and they would talk about ET.
And I'm like, well, have you ever played the game?
And it would come out that they didn't.
They would just kind of continue this myth
of the game being really horrible.
It is a good game.
It wasn't the worst that ATARI had to offer.
There were, like, I remember getting a game called Firefly.
That is the worst game for ATARI.
That's what everybody should be focusing
their efforts on, not ET.
Let me be clear.
The worst game ever made was obviously Trespasser.
So I just want to be clear with that.
With the shitload of just horrible, poorly made,
cranked out ATARI games,
to call ET the worst one is just shameful.
In contemporary game culture, we like trashing games.
I don't mean putting them in landfills.
But, verbally. Trashing game design.
It's become fashionable to sort of regard ET
as the worst video game of all time.
In fact, it makes everybody's list as the number one.
And I'm going to go out on a complete limb here and say,
and maybe people will attack me for this,
but I'd rather play ATARIs ET than any Call of Duty.
You know, in context, given the time, and the situation
that Howard had to live in to program that game,
it really is an astonishing master work.
He made an amazing fucking game
that's a whole self-contained world in five weeks.
That's even more impressive.
I don't know any human being who could have turned ET
in the timeframes involved into a really successful game.
He should be applauded for being able to have done anything
in the time that was allotted.
The scorn should be heaped upon those who thought that it was
even rational to try to build a cartridge in a month and a half.
The analogy that people always use for these first-timers,
for people who try something first,
is the first penguin analogy, where the first penguin
who jumps down the hole through the ice
is the one who invariably gets eaten by the seal.
But if there wasn't a first penguin,
then the penguins would be going out through the ice.
So, sucks to be the first penguin,
but somebody's got to do it.
So, it turned out that Joe Lewandowsky
had been right all along.
The games were buried, almost exactly where he had predicted.
And no mercury-filled pigs popped up out of the ground.
So, the legend of the burial was true.
Or was it?
When the archaeologists catalogued all the games,
there were a bunch of ET cartridges.
But nowhere near the millions that were
such a big part of the legend.
In fact, ET made up about 10% of the total games found.
The rest included some of the best games ever made.
Defender, and Centipede, and Yar's Revenge.
There was even one copy of Adventure, which I snagged.
The burial wasn't a cover-up or done out of shame.
It was a warehouse dump done by a company in financial distress.
At the time, the Alamogordo landfill
was just the most practical solution.
ET wasn't buried because it was the worst game ever.
People called it the worst game ever because it had been buried.
And as a result, it got blamed
for destroying an entire industry.
The game and its creator had taken the rap
for a crime they didn't commit.
The notion that ET caused the demise of ATARI
is simply stupid. It's just stupid.
ATARI committed suicide. It was not homicide.
And it wasn't the ET cartridge.
It was a concomitant effect of a lot of missteps in technology,
in deployment, in marketing.
So, people say ET destroyed the video game industry.
I'm sure I've heard that before, but it's just really funny.
You know, the behavior pattern that created the conditions for
the ET failure is what destroyed the video game industry.
The cause of the fall was ATARI trying to sell yet another
10 million ATARI 2600 into a market that was saturated.
ET didn't destroy ATARI.
It wasn't good, but it didn't destroy ATARI.
That's one of those things people say.
And the reality of life is if enough people say it,
it becomes the truth for people.
A simple answer that is clear and precise will always
have more power in the world than a complex one that is true.
Here's another ET 6-pack.
What I would like to see happen is I would like to see
whatever remains or recovered will then find their way
into a museum in the service of game industry.
Well, you know, the city of Alamogordo owns the games
and what have you that came through there,
by virtue of the fact they're in our landfill.
We might be able to sell them on eBay.
So, if another terrible video game needed to be buried,
would you be prepared to let it be buried in Alamogordo?
Absolutely. Come on down.
We'll bury your game.
ATARI was the first great consumer company
to come out of Silicon Valley.
It was exciting. It was different.
It was the first engagement that our generation
had with computer.
So a generation grew up being introduced
to the computer age by ATARI games.
We brought a whole massive new entertainment medium
into public consciousness.
So for a whole generation, we are the definition
of the video game era.
And it's cosmic.
These guys really never got their due
for really starting the whole industry.
Three lives was invented by a person.
Flying a ship around was invented by a person
who had to figure out what that was.
And it was so good that it was copied everywhere.
And because it was copied everywhere, because it's so
ubiquitous, it's impossible to remember why it was so special.
I think ATARI's legacy is that we started
the Silicon Valley ethic of engineers as rock stars.
Didn't exsist before. I think the casual culture,
meritocracy didn't exist before.
I believe these are underpinnings of the things
that makes and continues to make Silicon Valley
a special place in the world.
And, I think that ATARI will continue to endure
as an icon of innovation.