Video: Ars talks to the experts on Atari’s dump at yesterday’s big dig

4/27/14 Ars Technica by Megan Geuss

Microsoft

ALAMOGORDO, NM—When a film crew, a dig crew, and dozens of fans and journalists showed up at a decades-old desert landfill in New Mexico on Saturday, no one was certain what to expect. The crowd was hoping to confirm a story that made its way into gaming legend: that Atari dumped thousands, perhaps millions, of E.T. (and perhaps other) cartridges in this particular landfill back in 1983 at the height of the Video Game Crash.
While the excavation crew was digging down into the 1983 layer of the landfill, Ars got a chance to talk to E.T. programmer Howard Scott Warshaw, who was milling about, talking to fans and press. Warshaw famously claimed that the legend of E.T. cartridge burials was fake. Today, he's a licensed psychotherapist in California and says he aims to help people in high-tech circles work through their problems.
Perhaps that big-picture view of the industry is what helps him put the legends of E.T. into perspective. "It would be pretty to think that E.T. really was the downfall of the industry and that I, as a programmer, over the course of five weeks, was able to topple a billion-dollar industry. But I also have a degree in economics," Warshaw told Ars yesterday.

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