How Microsoft helped solve 30-year-old Atari desert landfill mystery

Atari collapsed in the early 1980s but its legend did not. For decades, a story circulated among video game enthusiasts claiming that the company dumped thousands of unsold game cartridges into a landfill in the New Mexico desert. More than 30 years later, an archaeological excavation finally set out to determine whether this so-called urban legend actually held any truth, and Microsoft played a surprising role in getting to the bottom of it.A ‘legendary’ flop and a ‘legendary’ landfill storyAtari's launch of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” is widely regarded as one of the biggest failures in video game history, and its release coincided almost exactly with Atari’s own downfall in the early 1980s. Back then, in a world without digital distribution, this meant hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of unsold or returned Atari cartridges piled up inside a warehouse in El Paso.