Efforts To Unearth Rumored Atari E.T. Landfill Move Forward

Two companies, a video game developer and a marketing firm, are working together in an attempt to unearth the fabled cache of E.T. Atari cartridges that are supposedly buried in a New Mexico landfill.


As the story goes, Atari's video game adaptation of E.T. was such a financial failure that the company was forced to dump a huge collection of unsold and returned E.T. cartridges into a landfill. Lightbox Interactive, the developer behind Starhawk on PlayStaiton 3, and Fuel Industries, a marketing agency, are putting together their resources in an attempt to confirm and unearth the existence of the cartridges.

Initially, their efforts were thwarted by New Mexico environmental regulators who called the excavation "generic" and lacking in too many specific details (like where they were planning on digging), according to a report from Alamogordo News, a news site located in the city where the landfill exists.

That report appeared yesterday, but today the Associate Press is reporting that the dig is planning on moving forward, despite the concerns of the environmental regulators. Jonathan Chinn, executive producer at LightBox, says the local waste-management consultant who filed the excavation permit is working to address the concerns brought forward by the environmental regulators.

Source gameinformer