Two Things Tuesday: The Alamogordo Atari Excavation Redux

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on a paper that I’ll be giving in August. This is partly because the organizers of the conference wanted my paper well in advance and partly because I’m going to take May and June off to focus on research in Greece and Cyprus. 

The paper focuses on landfills and particularly the excavation of Atari games in the Alamogordo landfill. You can get a sense for the paper and its context here. In this section of the paper (section three, for those of you keeping track on a score card), considers two key aspects of the the Alamogordo Atari excavations and sets up the final section of the paper which considers how studying landfills helps us think about the future of trash and waste streams.

This is largely based on chapter 1 from my fairly recent book. You can read an early version of that chapter here.

Enjoy:

This returns us to the edge of the Alamogordo landfill. In 2014 after several years of bureaucratic and political wrangling, a team of archaeologists and video game scholars accompanied a documentary film crew to Alamogordo, New Mexico to excavate the “old Alamogordo landfill.” This landfill deserved such attention because it had incubated an urban legend for over 25 years. In 1983, the video game company Atari dumped thousands of video games in the landfill. While the New York Times reported on this event, early internet discussion boards became fascinated by the story and speculated on the causes and even the veracity of the event. Ultimately, the urban legend came to focus on the E.T. video game. Atari developed the game based on the blockbuster Steven Spielberg film and the game initially sold relatively well, but soon attracted the ire of gaming enthusiasts for its difficult and unenjoyable play. By the mid-1980s, critics viewed the E.T. game as among the worst ever released. The urban legend coalesced around the idea that Atari had buried these games in a remote New Mexico landfill to hide their failure from the media, investors, and the public. The documentary film crew and the archaeologists present at the dig sought superficially to interrogate the urban legend by exposing the games buried some three decades previous in New Mexico.

As Rathje anticipated, the excavations revealed both the processes of landfill creation and the assemblages preserved in the myriad small lenses present in the landfill. The Alamogordo landfill consisted of two phases of activity. In the mid-1990s, a layer of garbage was spread across the surface of the landfill and covered with a layer of reddish brown local earth. Below this approximately 3 m deep layer level of later dumping was the original landfill. The vertical cut into the earth extended an additional 5 m below the 3 m second phase. This landfill “cell” received garbage dumped in vertical columns which slumped toward their base. Unlike many more recent landfills, these columns were not tightly packed. Beneath these slumping columns was the bottom of the cell. It was here that Atari deposited several truckloads of games. The landfill operator spread the games around the bottom of the cell and covered it with a thin and irregular layer of concrete after the operator caught local residents attempting to steal games.

The slumping columns of trash were remarkably well preserved even in the loosely compacted conditions of this 1980s small-town landfill. Grass clippings remained vibrant and green, printing on paper was legible, and kitchen waste appeared intact. In other words, remarkably little decomposition was visible. Because the trash was so well preserved, as the bucket of the excavator got closer to the bottom of the cell, the dates on paper artifacts recovered from the slumping base of the columns got closer to the date of the dumping. The excavator produced buckets with wrapping paper from Christmas in 1983, receipts dated to early December and late November, a paper check with the date of November 7, 1983, and Christmas catalogues from earlier in the fall. Finally, below the holiday and pre-holiday detritus appeared the first traces of the Atari dump amid a newspaper article from 28 September, 1983 describing the dumping of the games.

The excavations ultimately produced an assemblage of over 1500 games, which nevertheless reflects only a tiny fraction of the multiple truckloads of games dumped in the landfill. The games removed from the small sounding from the lowest levels of the Alamogordo landfill allow us to make two significant observations.

First, the assemblage of games was remarkably diverse and included more than just the much maligned E.T. game. In fact, the majority of the over 50 games represented in the assemblage were not the E.T. Some games were still in boxes or blister packs; others were loose. Most games dated to the period from 1980-1983, but there were a quite a few earlier games (e.g. Air Sea Battle, Breakout, Combat, Space War, Indy 500). Many had price tags on them. This suggests that many of these games represented returns from either consumers or from stores. 

Second, despite the anaerobic conditions of the landfill that ensured well-preserve newspapers and verdant grass clippings, the games themselves did not work when inserted into an Atari 2600 game console. This presumably reflects moisture damage to the cartridges or, just as plausibly, damage caused by their storage and transport to the dump prior to deposition. Of course, some games might have been defective leading to their return. 

 Both of these observations relate to the changing nature of not only American, but also global waste. The excavation of Atari games represents the first effort to excavate what is now called “e-waste” (which is a term that appeared only toward the end of the 1980s). In the 21st century, concern over e-waste has increased dramatically. Reports suggest that while electronic waste comprises less than 5% of our total consumer waste, it nevertheless represents some of the most toxic contents of our waste streams. Moreover, some have argued that post-consumer e-waste represents nearly 70% of all e-waste entering our waste streams. While it is probably unwise to trust these numbers (Lepawsky 2018), the presence of retail or commercial waste in a municipal landfill in the 1980s offers a historic window of how e-waste enters the waste stream. Interestingly, this was not the first time that this landfill had received commercial waste. In 1969, the landfill received a dozen hogs from the Huckleby farm which had eaten grain contaminated with mercury. After the family ate meat from a seemingly healthy hog and four of their eight children developed signs of mercury poisoning. The children’s pitiful decline became a national scandal and the poisoned hogs were discarded in the landfill. In the 1970s, the landfill received 5000 barrels of the pesticide malathion. The decision by Atari to dump commercial waste in this landfill stemmed from the low costs charged to dump commercial waste at the facility and its proximity to Atari’s El Paso distribution center. In this instance, an early example of e-waste followed an existing pattern of commercial dumping in a municipal landfill. The commingling of commercial waste and household waste in Alamogordo demonstrates the complexity of American waste streams. 

That these Atari games were not playable opens another window into the study of contemporary landfills. The value of these games was not in their component parts. The plastic cases, the microchips, and glossy labels cost relatively little to manufacture and traced the global network of manufacturing that allowed a game designed in California, manufactured in Asia, and distributed nationally through hubs in well-integrated cities like El Paso to reach consumers. The value of these games was in the digital content embedded in the cartridge and made visible by the Atari console. When the games ceased to function, whether at the bottom of a small-town landfill or in a cardboard box in a suburban closet, it becomes more difficult for an archaeologist to understand the social, cultural, and economic meaning of the game. The disposal of a game in the landfill makes it impossible to connect the object to the experience of re-narrating a film, competing with friends and family in a suburban home, or connecting the pixelated display of the 1980s Atari console to worlds of adventure. In this way, the game anticipates the rapidly dematerializing world of the 21st century where conveniences such as the World Wide Web, cellular phones, and increasingly ubiquitous internet of things (not to mention the mining of crypto-currency, the power of artificial intelligence software, and other computationally intensive processes such as weather forecasting) create experiences that are as materially ephemeral as they are resource intensive. The presence of Atari games in the landfill represents a moment in time when digital media begins to usurp physical media and make increasingly tenuous the relationship between the world of things and the digital experience that they mediate.   

In this context, it is hardly surprising that conspiracy theories that gained momentum in internet chat rooms contributed to the media attention that the excavations at the Alamogordo landfill received and that a documentary film company partly underwritten by Microsoft bankrolled excavations. In other words, the 21st-century excavation of landfill was a media event that substituted the missing experiences of playing the discarded Atari games with nostalgia. Just as archaeologists in the 1980s transposed their anxiety about consumerism onto a growing anxiety about waste, so the excavators in Alamogordo produced mediated nostalgia to replace the corrupted bits and bytes embedded on the discarded game cartridges.