Alamogordo, New Mexico -
Atari Video Game Burial Grounds (Secret)

In 1983, with the video game industry they had helped create crashing down around their ears, Atari warehouses were filled with thousands, even millions of unsold 2600 game cartridges they had optimistically overproduced, mostly E.T. games, a movie tie-in that the company had been pinning its hopes on for salvation, but ended up a huge flop...one of the reasons for the industry's collapse in the first place.

So Atari filled up a convoy of tractor-trailer trucks with this surplus of product, along with prototypes and limited runs of such experimental (read: desperate) 2600 hardware, including the ridiculous Mindlink system, a control method for the 2600 based on mind-control. This convoy of embarrassment was driven to Alamogordo, New Mexico, and placed in a huge secret landfill, and then entombed in cement.

As you can imagine, this event holds a mythic place in videogame history, a milestone that marked the end of the first wave of videogame systems in North America, the warhorses that spawned today's trillion-polygon crunching monsters like the Playstation and Dreamcast. The exact location of the burial is unknown to me, and could be a kind of 'Stonehenge' to videogame enthusiasts. I was wondering if it might be possible for you to shine your considerable resources to this mystery, so that game players around the world might be able to pay their respects to the technology that came before. In a weird twist, I read on your site that Alamogordo, NM is also the burial site for Ham, the first U.S. being into space, who is also entombed in cement. Bizarre! [Ummagumma, 12/19/1999]

[RA: This apparently happened using an Alamogordo commercial landfill, not open to the public. In addition to being crushed, the game trash was covered with a layer of concrete to discourage video game fans from future excavations.]