Finding the mother lode of Atari games

atari

It’s been an urban legend that Atari, having gone nuts mass producing catridges in the expectation they’d sell way more than they did, dumped a ton of them in a landfill and covered them over, with the hopes people wouldn’t realize what they’d done. A documentary crew went back, and sure enough, they were able to unearth proof that the cartridges were in a New Mexico landfill for decades.

This is a pretty fun discovery, and proof that a very successful business can get a bit too cocky and sure. After all, Atari rushed games to market full of bugs and just expected people to buy it; consumers will turn on you if they think the product being sold is sub-par. Atari was never really the same after the peak of the original video game rush, but its legacy lives on, including that fateful decision to landfill a surplus of games.

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