From NMAC-L 4-30-14
 
 
Apparently, NM Archaeologists Got Floppy Disks ...


 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/04/atari-video-game-indu
stry-crash-of-1983.html 
April 29, 2014 
Excavating the Video-Game Industry’s Past 
Posted by Ted Trautman 
In 1982, Atari controlled eighty per cent of the video-game market. A year  
later, as its C.E.O. stood accused of insider trading, demand for video 
games  had fallen so much that the company dumped fourteen trucks’ worth of  
merchandise in a New Mexico landfill and poured cement over the forsaken games 
 to prevent local children from salvaging them. 
It’s been more than thirty years since what’s known as the video-game 
crash  of 1983, and the children of that era have grown up, a lingering passion 
for  video games notwithstanding. On Saturday, several hundred of them 
returned to  the landfill in New Mexico with heavy machinery and a team of 
archaeologists  to excavate the site and revisit a defining moment in video-game 
history. 
The landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, about ninety miles north of El  
Paso, is the gaming world’s Roswell. This is partly, perhaps, because of its  
proximity to the real Roswell, but also because they’re both rumored to be  
hiding aliens: the dump was said to hold more than three million copies of 
the  famously awful Atari adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The  
Extra-Terrestrial.” Unwanted products routinely end up in landfills, but the  
sudden desert burial of countless games, associated with an iconic movie and  
adapted for an iconic console, was material colorful enough for a legend.  
Saturday’s dig confirmed that the legend is true, although the archaeologists  
on hand estimated that the E.T. cartridges numbered in the thousands, not 
the  millions. 
“It was pretty tense right up until we found the cartridges,” Mike Burns,  
the C.E.O. of the marketing company Fuel Entertainment, told me after the 
dig.  The excavation project was Burns’s brainchild, and his staff spent 
eighteen  months securing permits from local officials and funding from Microsoft
’s Xbox  Entertainment Studios, which in turn hired the producers Simon and 
Jonathan  Chinn to make a documentary about the dig. 
Until Saturday, no one knew for sure what was buried in Alamogordo. The  
Times and local media recorded fourteen trucks dumping merchandise from  Atari’
s El Paso factory in September, 1983, but Atari representatives didn’t  
allow anyone to get close enough to see exactly what was being buried. The  
E.T. guess was a good one, though, because Atari had produced many more copies  
of the game than people wanted. The fans who traveled to Alamogordo to 
witness  the excavation clearly wanted the games to be there. They cheered when 
workers  unearthed the first Atari artifact of the day, a joystick, and they 
cheered  more loudly when Zak Penn, who is directing Microsoft’s 
documentary,  approached the crowd, held up an E.T. cartridge, and announced, “We 
found  something.” The crew filled bucket after bucket with games—yes, some 
copies of  E.T., but also more commercially successful titles like Centipede, 
Space  Invaders, and Asteroid. Planners had hoped to insert a recovered game 
into a  preserved Atari console and play it on site, but a dust storm during 
the dig  convinced them to save that experiment for a more sterile 
environment than an  open landfill in the desert. 
Alamogordo is a symbol of the crash of ’83, but Atari’s troubles began a  
year earlier. The company had been a classic Silicon Valley startup. It even 
 employed Steve Jobs for a time (although, according to Walter Isaacson’s  
biography of Jobs, he was asked to work the night shift after his co-workers 
 complained about his abrasive personality and body odor). But Atari hadn’t 
yet  figured out the precise timing required to successfully transition 
from one  generation of consoles to the next. Today’s console makers have 
settled into a  predictable rhythm, typically releasing new machines every five 
or six years,  enough time for customers to trust that a “next-generation” 
system will be  genuinely superior to the one it replaced. In the early 
eighties, the process  was far less orderly: manufacturers issued new systems 
much more frequently,  and their newness often hinged on gimmickry, such as a 
built-in screen or a  different kind of controller, rather than major 
technical milestones. The  Atari 5200 console, released in 1982, thus cannibalized 
sales of the older  Atari 2600 but didn’t offer enough technical 
improvements to persuade many  people to trade up. Even as Atari promoted the 5200, it 
flooded the market  with games for the 2600. In addition, company executives 
were overly  optimistic, producing, for instance, twelve million copies of 
a Pac-Man game  for the 2600 even though only ten million people owned that 
console. They  ended up selling seven million copies, making it the 
best-selling video game  in history at the time, but the unsold five million copies 
were an  embarrassment. Worse still, the game was ridden with glitches; many 
customers  demanded refunds. 
The E.T. game, also built for the 2600 console, fared even worse: Atari  
sold just one and a half million copies of the five million it had shipped to  
stores. At the time, Atari was a subsidiary of Warner Communications, which 
 also owned Warner Bros. Pictures and a number of other media properties. 
As  Ray Kassar, then Atari’s C.E.O., recounts in Steven Kent’s “The Ultimate 
 History of Video Games,” Warner’s C.E.O., Steve Ross, insisted that the 
game  be on shelves in time for Christmas, 1982, which meant it had to be 
designed  in just six weeks (compared to a typical lead time in those days of 
six months  or more). The resulting game was primitive, despite the best 
efforts of its  programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw, who attended Saturday’s 
excavation to  explain to fans exactly why the game was so bad. 
Neither of these failures appeared in Warner’s earnings reports until  
December 7, 1982, when Atari announced that it expected a ten- to  
fifteen-per-cent increase in sales in its fourth quarter, rather than the  fifty-per-cent 
increase it had predicted earlier in the year, which video-game  historians 
have attributed in large part to the failure of the two games. The  next 
day Warner’s stock tumbled, and Kassar was accused of insider trading  when it 
was revealed that he had sold five thousand of his shares just minutes  
before releasing the bad news. (He was later cleared by the Securities and  
Exchange Commission.) Atari’s resulting collapse formed the core of the  
industry-wide crash of ’83. Warner broke Atari into three units—home  computing, 
game consoles, and arcade gaming—and sold them off in 1984 and  1985. What 
was left of Atari’s once-mighty video-game division limped along  from owner 
to owner for another two decades, before finally declaring  bankruptcy last 
year. The company’s later incarnations never came close to  regaining the 
market dominance of the early eighties. 
It’s often said that video games might have died forever with Atari,  
remembered only as a short-lived fad, if Nintendo hadn’t come to the United  
States to rescue them two years later. But video games are no more a fad than  
the Internet is; the crash lasted as long as it did only because none of  
Atari’s competitors in the U.S. console market—including Coleco, Mattel, and a 
 half-dozen others—offered sufficiently diverting hardware or games to fill 
the  void. Instead of stepping up to claim Atari’s former market share, 
they were  dragged down with the company to ruin, and it wasn’t until Nintendo’
s arrival,  in late 1985, that the industry began to show new signs of 
life. Nintendo,  which had been planning before the crash to offer Atari 
worldwide distribution  rights outside Japan for its Famicom console (later known 
in the United States  as the Nintendo Entertainment System), now saw that it 
could compete with the  diminished Atari. The company came to dominate the 
video-game world for the  rest of the eighties and much of the nineties. Both 
of its major  challengers—Sega and Sony—were Japanese, too. 
After Atari’s collapse, its successors released new consoles at a slower  
pace, finally settling into a five-to-six-year cycle by the time the sixth  
generation of hardware was released, in the early aughts. This generation  
included Nintendo’s GameCube, Sony’s PlayStation 2, and Microsoft’s Xbox—the 
 first American-made console to gain significant market share since the 
days of  Atari. Perhaps it’s appropriate that Microsoft is the one to be 
excavating in  Alamogordo, like a young man visiting his grandfather’s grave.