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.