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ET found in landfill [Xbox troll = ban]

J

Jarrod38

Member
They do exist.
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Also for the people wondering why they are still in good shape is besides being on top of trash plastic takes years to decompose.
 
G

Goldmund

Member
I only had time to read the thread title, sorry. A lot of children must be really upset now. ET never made it home. The movie they made based on the real encounter was a propaganda piece (made even more obvious by the slapdash touch-up job twenty years later), trying to conceal the truth. Breaking the link with Elliott did kill ET who I guess then was unceremoniously dumped in a landfill. Disgusting. I can't even look at the pictures. Allow ET to absorb your vitality, children, it's the only way for him to make it out alive. He's our only hope to bring down the government.
 
S

Salex_

Member
BroBuzz said:
Great timing you two. No wonder /r/xboxone hates this place.
Click to expand...

Stop being a drama queen please.

You can easily cherry pick comments like that on any somewhat positive thread. For example, go take a look at the PS4 7M sold thread and you'll see the snarky "no games" posts. Or any Wii U/Vita thread you can find unrelated remarks about the terrible sales.
 
T

The Flash

Banned
wWzkBmu.jpg


Anyways, I'm surprised so many people are themselves surprised that they found something. When I first heard the story I just assumed that it was true to an extent.
 
CassidyIzABeast

CassidyIzABeast

Member
A New York Times article from Sept. 28, 1983, says 14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and computer equipment were dumped on the site. An Atari spokesman quoted in the story said the games came from its plant in El Paso, Texas, some 80 miles south of Alamogordo.

Local news reports from the time said that the landfill employees were throwing cartridges there and running a bulldozer over them before covering them with dirt and trash.

The city of Alamogordo agreed to give the documentarians 250 cartridges or 10% of the cartridges found, whichever is greater, according to local media reports.
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Joe Lewandowski, who became manager of the 300-acre landfill a few months after the cartridge dump and has been a consultant for the documentarians, told The Associated Press that they used old photographs and dug exploratory wells to find the actual burial site. A spokeswoman for Xbox said they've dug to remove the upper layers of trash in preparation for Saturday's dig.

Lewandowski says he remembers how the cartridge dump was a monstrous fiasco for Atari, at least from the perspective of a small desert town. The company, he says, brought truckloads from El Paso, where at the time scavenging was allowed in the city's landfills. "Here, they didn't allow scavenging. It was a small landfill, it had a guard."

The guard, however, was either away or unable to stop scores of teenagers from rummaging through the Atari waste and showing up in town trying to sell the discarded products and equipment from the backs of pickup trucks, Lewandowski, said. "That's when they decided to pour concrete over."
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Some quotes from the USA Today article
 
F

funkystudent

Member
Really cool if true. Need more proof then a handful of slightly crushed carts though so I am still sceptical.


But if this is a success can they make "The Making of Duke Nukem Forever" next?
 
M

Magwik

Banned
The dug it up to find a place for the extra Zune's :(
Jokes aside this is actually very cool to seem come to truth. I always wanted to believe it was real.
 
A

aspiegamer

Member
Since I know Microsoft funded this project, I have an immediate desire to go purchase an Xbox One!

No, but I'm actually curious about the eventual TV product because this has always been such an awesome myth. I can't think of any reason to suggest any of this is faked. Inorganic stuff buried in a dry climate like that would have an extremely low decomposition rate. Hell, the US military keeps countless pieces of multi-million dollar hardware out there just in case they need to bring the stuff back into service one day.

One assumes the good footage is there and they're just trying to tease for the eventual show, but I'm sort of wondering why Microsoft has Major Nelson as the apparent "host" of the show (and that picture of him half-wearing the hard hat trying to look badass is absurd)... That crazy History Channel guy would have been SO AWESOME. He could explain to us that, because there were no phones found in the pile, there was no logical way that ET could ever have reached his home planet. Conspiracy!
 
Megatron

Megatron

Member
Surface of Me said:
People didn't believe this? Honestly never seemed that far fetched to me.
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I believed they were there, what seems weird to me is how they seem to have found them so fast when people who worked for Atari said it wasn't true. How did they know where to look? I read an article in IGN this morning saying they thought they'd find them today, and now they have? I want to see photos of the mountains of cartridges, I want to see what they were put in. The paper cases surely should have biodegraded so they weren't put directly in the dirt?
 
B

border

Member
Darknight said:
Since when was this a "myth"? I always saw this as a truth?.
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I don't think it was ever doubted that at some point Atari disposed of a lot of defective or unsold merchandise.

The "myth" part is largely the number of cartridges dumped, and whether or not it's all ET. And certainly people doubted that it would be possible to pinpoint the burial site so effectively.

I am interested to see how much stuff they find in total, and if it really is like a million copies of ET.
 
J

Jacobi

Banned
Haha, pretty nice closure of a video game legend.
Atari burying those game boxes seems like a solution Mr. Burns would come up with
 
7

7threst

Member
Is Nolan Bushnell or anybody else from Atari back in the day involved in this documentary or do they refuse to cooperate with MS in any way? Because a definitive documentary about this with help from those who were there at the time would be awesome.
 
S

Salvor.Hardin

Banned
Megatron said:
I believed they were there, what seems weird to me is how they seem to have found them so fast when people who worked for Atari said it wasn't true. How did they know where to look? I read an article in IGN this morning saying they thought they'd find them today, and now they have? I want to see photos of the mountains of cartridges, I want to see what they were put in. The paper cases surely should have biodegraded so they weren't put directly in the dirt?
Click to expand...

There are plenty of articles online explainaing how they found them. If you're actually interested, the information you want is a short google search away.
 
S

StoopKid

Member
border said:
I don't think it was ever doubted that at some point Atari disposed of a lot of defective or unsold merchandise.

The "myth" part is largely the number of cartridges dumped, and whether or not it's all ET. And certainly people doubted that it would be possible to pinpoint the burial site so effectively.

I am interested to see how much stuff they find in total, and if it really is like a million copies of ET.
Click to expand...

That would be so cool.

I wonder what they would do with them.
 
S

sangreal

Member
Megatron said:
I believed they were there, what seems weird to me is how they seem to have found them so fast when people who worked for Atari said it wasn't true. How did they know where to look??
Click to expand...

the project was set in motion by a landfill operator who claimed to have witnessed the dump
 
Theonik

Theonik

Member
7threst said:
It that actually an excavated cartridge? Even if the gameplay sucks, the built quality of the cartridges is top notch. This one looks brand new.
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Well they are new sealed copies which were burried in their boxes. In this environment and with only 30 years it's reasonable to expect at least some carts to be in (near)mint condition after some dusting. Especially if there are thousands of them in there.
Of course if they were CDs they'd more than likely all be gone. Jewel cases don't deal with pressure very well (they'd shatter rather than compact) and disks are susceptible to scratches and diskrot.
 
SkylineRKR

SkylineRKR

Member
border said:
I don't think it was ever doubted that at some point Atari disposed of a lot of defective or unsold merchandise.

The "myth" part is largely the number of cartridges dumped, and whether or not it's all ET. And certainly people doubted that it would be possible to pinpoint the burial site so effectively.

I am interested to see how much stuff they find in total, and if it really is like a million copies of ET.
Click to expand...

Yeah its known that Atari dumped some shit there, defects et al. The E.T. thing is still not entirely proven, unless they find a crapload of them in particular.
 
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