phone home atari

There’s an urban legend of a treasure. A treasure that would make pirates scream like a giddy girl on pizza day. A treasure that would make tigers purr like kittens in teacups! A treasure that would make gold coins look like a pile of yellow underwear lint!

A landfill where it is rumored Atari dumped a bunch of cruddy video games (mostly E.T.) in 1983!

I had an Atari 2600. It rocked. I also had the E.T. video game! I’m not sure if it belonged to me or my brother. It most likely belonged to my brother because he was older and smarter and had a job building a time machine for the government when we were kids, so he had lots of money to throw around.

At least, that’s what he told me. If I disagreed, he would beat me up. I generally agreed.

I can still remember TO THIS DAY that I could NOT understand what to do in E.T. AT ALL. I guess nobody else could figure it out because it is considered one of the worst video games of all time! Atari was so embarrassed by it that they took E.T. (and possibly a bunch of other awful games) and secretly dumped them into a landfill in southern New Mexico.

The story says that 10-20 trucks FILLED with games were buried with hopes that they would just die a quiet death there.

NO SUCH LUCK! A Canadian production company is going to film a documentary with them digging through the landfill for the games! I don’t know why. I guess Canada just got the Atari 2600 and can’t find any games for it. Sometimes things happen later in Canada.

I also remember a game called Track and Field. I think it gave me carpal tunnel. You had to move the joystick back and forth REALLY fast to get your character to run. I would put my palm on the top of the joystick and shake my hand back and forth like crazy to get a good time. Like I was waving at the floor really, really fast.

I may have gotten a good score, but now my hands can’t stop shaking. The doctors say it’s a genetic disease. I say it’s post Atari stress disorder.

There’s a possibility that this is all false. Atari has never said that ANY of this is true. Hopefully it is. I would like to play Yars' Revenge again.

I’m off to track and also field.

Enjoy Everything.

-dj