Atari Video Game Burial - Legacy

Legacy

The conflicting information surrounding the burial has led to it being referred to as an urban legend, which in turn has led to a degree of skepticism and doubt over the veracity of the story, and the relevance of conflating the event with the later industry downturn. As recently as October 2004, Howard Scott Warshaw, the programmer responsible for the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game expressed doubts that the destruction of millions of copies of the game ever took place. Warshaw also believes that Atari's downfall was more a result of their business practices—including alleged block booking of poorly selling games with successful ones when dealing with distributors—than any specific failed games. This latter view has been echoed by Travis Fahs of IGN, who believes that Atari's problems, including their huge surplus of unsold stock, arose from the company's overestimation of the sustainability of Atari 2600 sales, rather than being due to the individual quality of games being released. Writing for the Pacific Historical Review, John Wills has also described the burial as an urban legend, calling it "widely acknowledged but rarely substantiated". Wills believes that the location's place in the public psyche—its proximity to the sites of both the Trinity nuclear test and Roswell UFO incident—has aided the popularity of the story.

The incident has also become something of a cultural symbol representative of the North American video game crash of 1983, often cited as a cautionary tale about the hubris of poor business practices, despite suggestions that the burial allowed the company to write off the disposed-of material for tax relief purposes. The legacy of the burial has led it to be referenced in popular culture. The music video for the song "When I Wake Up" by Wintergreen depicts the band traveling to the landfill site and proceeding to dig up the abandoned cartridges; the video's director Keith Schofield had worked with video game-based music videos before. The novel Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss features a scene which takes place outside of Alamogordo, in which two of the characters discuss a parking lot which has been built over the site of the burial. The upcoming film Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie will feature a plot centered on the burial.