Canadian company searching for buried ET video games:

[Ubiquitous]

By John Bear

According to Kozar Cool Blog, the top five myths about video games are:
Video games lead to violence.

� irls don't play video games (I know at least one who does, a lot).

� You can use the chips from a PlayStation 2 to make the guidance system
on a missile.

� Pong was the first video game.

The number one video game myth: there are millions of Atari cartridges
buried in the desert of New Mexico.

Well, that last one might actually be true.

If you check out the Alamogordo page on Wikipedia, you will see
information on the Trinity Site (even if it happened closer to Socorro),
Ham the Space Chimp and the so-called Atari Graveyard.

Probably Located off First Street near the Charlie T. Lee Memorial Relief
Route, the old landfill now dons old toilets illegally dumped next to the
dried-up blooms from century plants.

Joe Lewandowski who has been in the garbage business for decades said the
urban legend about thousands of copies of E.T., The Extraterrestrial
Atari game buried in an old landfill on the west side of town, is one of
the biggest rumors among gamers.

Lewandowski said some people believe the story.

Others don't.

In fact, I had scarcely finished an online story about a film company
coming to search for the games before he received an email from an author
of a book stating that the myth had already been debunked in a book. (His
book, by the way.)

Lewandowski said many of the people who were involved in the massive
game dump have since died, which does nothing to quell the imaginations
of the more conspiracy-minded people out there.
Some people have said the Daily News reporter who wrote the original
story in 1983 doesn't actually exist. She did and has also since exited
the mortal coil. The plot thickens. Cue sinister music.

Whether you believe the legend is one thing. But everyone pretty much
agrees that the E.T. game has one major problem it isn't any good. E.T.
keeps falling down a hole, so a player can't really get anywhere except
for the beginning, over and over and over ...

Lewandowski said millions of the games were manufactured and almost all
of them were returned (except those believed to lie beneath the
Friendliest Place on Earth, Alamogordo).

District 1 Commissioner Jason Baldwin earlier this month admitted to
having played the game and said that, indeed, it was horrible.

You can shag a copy of the game on eBay for about five bucks. If ironic
detachment is your thing, someone also sells T-shirts emblazoned with
"Atari 1982" and a pixilated image of the wrinkly little alien from which
the game derives its name. A band called Wintergreen even made a music
video on the subject.

Lewandowski said Atari already had fallen on hard financial times. The
company paid Steven Spielberg tens of millions of dollars to license the
E.T. name, and the dud of a game caused its worth to sink even farther.

He said he was present at the landfill in September of 1983 to see the
first of nine truckloads of the games that were allegedly dumped by one
of his competitors. Laws regarding the discarding of garbage and the
running of landfills were much more relaxed in the early 1980s.

Twenty one more truckloads of the games are believed to exist, but where
they ended up remains a mystery. Thieves purportedly hijacked one of the
truck loads and rode it to Mexico, he said.

Lewandowski said some of games and other Atari-related brick-a-brack were
run over with a bulldozer and slathered in concrete, which probably
helped to preserve them if they are, in fact, actually there.

Local youth took advantage of lax security at the landfill the night the
first games showed up and soon local stores were being inundated with
people bringing in crates of the pilfered electronics to sell, he said.

Lewandowski has wanted the story to be told for years and said more than
one cable channel has floated the idea, though none has ever come to
fruition.

He might get his chance. The city commission on Tuesday agreed to allow
Fuel Industries, a company with offices in California and Ontario,
Canada, six months to dig up the old landfill where the games are (maybe)
buried. Fuel did not respond to a request for comment.

Lewandowski is pretty sure where the games lie, but he ain't sayin' just
where. You're just going to have to wait.

--
"We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends"
-- Barack "Dear Ruler" Obama