The legend is true: E.T. Atari games unearthed in NM landfill

ALAMOGORDO, N.M., April 27 (UPI) -- Documentary filmmakers on Saturday finally proved the urban legend true — game maker Atari dumped truckloads of failed E.T. video game cartridges in a landfill in the New Mexico desert.

The haul was discovered Saturday near Alamogordo, N.M., as part of an effort by the documentarians to find truckloads of copies of the game so bad Atari had to dump its inventory in the trash.

The game was created shortly after the release of Steven Spielberg's science-fiction hit, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1983.

The game was expected to sell many millions of copies, but only sold about 1.5 million.

Since then, an urban legend on par with Big Foot and the chupacabra has popped up, saying somewhere out there in the New Mexico desert lies all those unsold copies of the Atari 2600 game.

Saturday, filmmakers discovered the legend is true.

"We found something," one of the workers announced to a gathered crowd at the site. "We found an intact E.T., the video game."