New Mexico's 'Atari Dump' to Be Excavated
westerndigs.blogspot.com
westerndigs.blogspot.com
All the kids around the neighborhood started taking boxes from the truck and someone figured out you could toss the flat boxes like freesbies. We had tons of fun throwing these boxes around and it didn't occur to me how strange it was to find these empty, new boxes until many years later. I couldn't figure out how this truck-full of boxes was on our street. At the time Juarez was a major manufacturer of electronics and other stuff for the US so, in retrospect, it's possible the boxes actually originated from there.
His comment did not do that.
( •_•) ( •_•)>⌐□-□ (⌐□_□)
Has been rendered karmatose.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070307122420/http://atari.digit...
An excavation should be interesting. There are years of post-Atari dump trash and other material to get through.
In talking to the author back then he said that Atari poured cement on their material in the landfill in 1983, but the landfill was still in use until the until the 90's when the EPA marked the site for hazardous material and shut it down. The landfill was setup before rubber bladders were mandatory and it was leaking into the water table. The protocol for capping a landfill at the time was a thick layer of natural clay with methane vent pipes. After that, at least a foot of dirt is placed on top.
After capping it went on to be used for recreational purposes (ATVs, 4x4s, etc.).
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/28/business/atari-parts-are-d...
Also, when talking about E.T. and the landfill you are obliged to link to the music video made by an indie band about the fiasco[1].
A guy named Adam Bailey, who did a pretty good look at the Atari Landfill site in the mid-2000s, approached the band about the video. While the video is cool, it is actually fake. It was filmed in Texas using games with E.T. labels printed for them.
This makes sense, as Atari dumped the games in 1983 but the landfill was in use until the 90's. Any digging should have a fair amount of debris. There is 7 years of trash to get through, not to mention the poured concrete.
[1]:http://bestofthe80s.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/geraldo-and-al-...
I went there once a few years ago during the summer. It was brutally hot out and dry as hell, but the sand was so cool you could have sworn there was an ice-rink under it or something. Even weirder though, it hurt to stare directly at the sand for too long since it reflected sunlight so well. I expect that you could probably get snow-blindness from staring at it for too long.
It felt like being in a field of gritty snow inside of an oven.
Alamogordo is about an hour away from where I live, I can't help but wonder if they'll let me pay a visit and check it out.
I would add that Alamogordo was the fictitious location of the giant ants in the film "Them!"
- Galaxian
- Enduro
- Megamania
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Defender
- Ms. Pac Man
- Berserk
- Battlezone and Robot Tank
- Q*Bert
Of course, the NES was a much better machine than the 2600. That, however, doesn't doom all 2600 games.
- Pitfall
- Adventure
- Missile CommandThough I'll agree about the controllers -- though personally I preferred the infamous disk on the Intellivision to even the Atari 2600 joystick so I'm probably biased towards that paradigm anyway. I also enjoyed Treasure of Tarmin far, far more than I had any right to.
[edit] though not as much as Misty Mountain.
(Stupid snakes.)
One can find at least a dozen games one would like to play on almost every generation but when it gets to pre NES there are but a few.
| the infamous disk on the Intellivision
Given how loose the disks were, I don't know if that would have been much of an improvement or not. Probably would've been, but not by much.
I can't imagine the insurance cost for this documentary, if their underwriter even knows what they're doing.
"E.T. Comes Home, Or How We Created A Superfund Site"