ALAMOGORDO, New Mexico - You are the world's greatest video game maker, but suddenly you find yourself stuck with millions of cartridges of a game nobody wants. What do you do?

You load the cartridges into trucks and bury them in the New Mexico desert.

Atari did just that almost 30 years ago, or so the story goes. The truth lies beneath packed dirt and poured concrete in a landfill by the railroad tracks here, where this city of about 32,000, home to an Air Force base and the state's Museum of Space History, dumped its garbage many years ago.

A sign warning "Keep Out" marks what may be the final resting place for the video game E.T., recalled by some as one of the worst video games ever made.

Snopes.com, the Web authority on rumors, hoaxes and urban myths, ruled the burial of the E.T. cartridges a legend, though rumors feed the mystery.

"It's not a myth," Mark Esquero, 69, said, brandishing a cartridge of E.T., one of more than a dozen games he said he scooped from the landfill the night after Atari dumped its loot.

The event has captured the imagination of the original joystick generation, to whom the video game experience was grounded on the enchanting possibilities of rudimentary graphic designs. It has inspired music videos and an independent film based on the Web television series "The Angry Video Game Nerd," whose main character, traumatized by the E.T. game, sets out to debunk the legend of the landfill, hoping to save young generations of gamers from the trauma of playing it.

"Everybody's always fantasized about digging up those games," James Rolfe, the filmmaker and star of the series, said. "It's the perfect nerdy treasure hunt."

Fuel Entertainment, a digital company in Los Angeles, acquired a permit to excavate the landfill over the coming six months. Mike Burns, the company's chief executive, cautioned, "there might be nothing" or "there might be the holy grail of video games."

There is no definitive account of that day in September 1983 when the trucks brought the Atari haul here. One story put the number of trucks at 20. Joe Lewandowski, who ran a waste-management company here in the 1980s, said 29 trucks had left Atari's plant in El Paso, Texas, just over the border from New Mexico, and that 9 had made it to the landfill. "The other 20," he said, "no one knows what happened."

There is a rumor that one of the trucks was hijacked along the way and taken to Mexico.

Atari, which filed for bankruptcy this year, has been mum over the years.

E.T., the video game, was made in five weeks so it could hit the market for the 1982 Christmas shopping season. Hoping to cash in on the blockbuster movie "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," Atari paid Steven Spielberg, its director and co-producer, $20 million to $25 million for rights to the name.

The game was a huge flop. More than half of the five million cartridges made were returned.

City officials here see the impending excavation of the landfill as an opportunity.

Mayor Susie A. Galea, 32, said, "If you look at Roswell," the city about 200 kilometers to the east where an unidentified flying object is rumored to have crash-landed in 1947, "it has a theme. Alamogordo doesn't."

"The dig turns us into a destination," she said, "regardless of what it is that they find in there."

The New York Times

(China Daily 07/14/2013 page12)