In 1983, Atari buried thousands of unsold E.T. game cartridges in a New Mexico desert after the game's catastrophic failure nearly collapsed the video game industry.

The E.T. burial was long dismissed as an urban legend until it was definitively confirmed in 2014. In 1982, Atari paid $21 million for the licensing rights to Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film. Programmer Howard Scott Warshaw was given only five weeks to complete the game—an extraordinarily tight deadline for a project that typically required six to nine months. This compressed development schedule resulted in a product widely recognized as one of the worst video games ever made.The commercial failure of E.T. became a major catalyst for the North American video game crash of 1983, which devastated the industry with a 97 percent drop in revenues. Atari manufactured approximately 4 million cartridges but sold only 1.5 million, creating an enormous surplus. In September 1983, trucks transported the unsold inventory from Atari's warehouse in El Paso, Texas, to the Alamogordo City Landfill in New Mexico. Contemporary reports indicated the cartridges were crushed and buried beneath concrete to deter scavenging.For decades, skeptics dismissed the story as myth or exaggeration. However, on April 26, 2014, an excavation team led by Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment Studios began excavating the site. They successfully recovered hundreds of cartridges, including E.T. and other titles such as Centipede and Missile Command. The discovery was documented in the film Atari: Game Over, which provided irrefutable evidence of the burial. Today, several recovered cartridges are part of the Smithsonian Institution's permanent collection.