Burial Bits & Bites

Curious objects have always left legendary tales in their wake. These two stories should serve as powerful examples.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Video games have become the dominant form of entertainment in
the modern world, but it's easy to forget that they've
actually been around for quite a while. Before Microsoft, Nintendo,
and Sony dominated the market, there was, of course, Atari,
and Atari has a curious history with a few skeletons
in its closet, well sort of. Atari wasn't the first

(00:58):
or only game company in the nineteen eighties. I personally
remember playing with my in television, but it did own
the vast majority of the market. Video games were a
new and addicting form of entertainment, and people ate up
just about every new game that Atari put out. But
it was a business tale as old as time. Atari
became too comfortable in their success and the quality of

(01:21):
their product started to diminish. The most infamous example of
this was their adaptation of Steven Spielberg's movie Et the Extraterrestrial.
It seemed that this was going to be a slam dunk.
The movie was a mega hit, instantly impressing audiences as
one of the greatest films ever made, and it remained
the highest grossing movie of all time for over a decade,

(01:45):
and Atari spent millions on acquiring the license to make
a game. But as any good developer will tell you,
this is a very backwards way to go about doing things.
Games are gameplay first and story second. They need to
be fun to play. Just because the movie was good
didn't mean that the game would be, and the company's
approach to production was all business and no creativity. They

(02:08):
wanted to release ET in time for Christmas, so it
was made entirely from scratch to completion in exactly five weeks.
Before comparison, Atari's version of pac Man took twice as
long to develop, and that's a much simpler concept than ET.
Would the game include Elliott releasing the frogs from his
science class. Would it show the inner workings of ET's spaceship.

(02:30):
Would it faithfully recreate the iconic family home? Well, no,
it would do none of those things. Instead, creator Howard
Warshaw immediately got bogged down in the idea of pits
literally just big holes that Et would fall down into
and then climb out of. This wasn't representative of anything
in the movie, although to be fair, there are some

(02:52):
aspects of the game that did match the film. ET's
goal in going down into these holes was to collect
pieces of a phone so that he could phone home.
He also picks up Reese's pieces for health and is
chased by government agents, just like in the film, but
it simply wasn't enough. The game technically sold a good
amount of copies over the holidays, but Atari had expected

(03:14):
it to do so well that they produced millions more
cartridges than they actually sold, and this contributed to the
collapse of Atari's overall business. By nineteen eighty three, many
of their assets were being sold off. Most curiously, this
included a warehouse in New Mexico where Atari had a
bunch of unsold games stored, and since these were absolutely worthless,

(03:36):
it was decided that the cheapest thing to do would
be to dump them in a nearby landfill. But then
something curious started to happen. Children from town caught on
to the fact that it was an Atari warehouse that
had dumped its stock into the landfill, and so they
began to scavenge the site, where they found free copies
of ET and other games, and soon everyone in the

(03:57):
town had a copy, although if they played it, they
probably didn't feel so lucky. The owners of the landfill
caught wind of what was happening and soon covered it
up and posted guards to keep people away. Then years
passed by, and an urban legend began to form around
the site. People knew that millions of copies of ET
had gone unsold, and it gradually gained a reputation as

(04:20):
the worst video game of all time. People also knew
about the landfill story, and they started to conflate the
two things. They thought that Atari hadn't just dumped one
warehouse worth of games into the landfill, but millions of
unsold copies of ET. The legend got so popular that
a documentary was made about it, and a crew got

(04:40):
permission to dig up the site in twenty fourteen, and
what they found filled them with even more curiosity. There were,
in fact, unopened copies of ET buried at the site. However,
as they kept digging, they realized that it wasn't just
et but a variety of Atari games from that time.
In the end, there were about thirteen hundred games in

(05:00):
the landfill, not millions, and not all et. Extra et
stock was probably destroyed in a variety of ways in
the nineteen eighties, and plenty was probably sold or even
given away. But if the game wasn't as heartwarming as
the movie, at least it could fill some minds with
curiosity and lead them on a decade's long search for

(05:21):
buried treasure. That is, of course, if terrible Atari games
are your idea of a prize. Humankind's love affair with

(05:43):
alcohol has always transcended mere drunkenness. Ever since discovering the
brewing process in the Neolithic period, through the Ages, and
across civilizations, we have spent countless hours experimenting with booze,
sometimes finding bewilderingly new ways to enjoy both the intoxication
and the journey to get there. Now, if you're curious,

(06:03):
the intentional fermentation process dates back to around seven thousand
BCE in Iran and Egypt. The drink of choice back
then was zabib, a barley and honey brew flavored with
herbs and dates, which was said to produce visions within
its drinker, and at the very same time, on the
other side of the world, the Mayan and Incan civilizations

(06:24):
were brewing chicha and cooem, which was made by groups
gathering to chew cassava or maize and then spitting the
saliva forward mass into large communal bowls to ferment. The
enzymes in the saliva helped to speed the process along,
converting the starches into sugars that slowly turned into the
desired alcohol. This isn't some long lost recipe. It is

(06:46):
still made and enjoyed today in some South and Central
American countries. And the Romans too came at drinking in
creative ways, mixing honey with their wine to make a
sweet beverage known as mulsom. They also added garum, pungent
fermented fish sauce for a deep umami undertone that would
scandalize contemporary palettes. And elsewhere in the Mediterranean, the Greeks

(07:08):
brewed a heady mix of wine, honey, and spices called hippocris.
Their parties featured elaborate rituals where hosts served three bowls,
the first for health, another for pleasure, and a third
for sleep, and according to the comedian Ubulus, there were
actually more bowls than that, with a fourth belonging to violence,
a fifth to uproar, and so on. These early brews

(07:30):
evolved over the centuries into caudle, a medieval mix of
warm ale sugar and nutmeg, as well as egg and
the occasional grated cheese. These weren't merely meant as a
way to unwine. They were easy ways to get calories,
sometimes serving as an entire meal replacement. Frequently, these drinks
serve medicinal purposes as well. In Europe, there were endless

(07:51):
variations on these concoctions. Monks made oxomel, mixing wine and
honey with vinegar, which was used as a tonic to
cure any number of ailments, and which was frequently spiked
with herbs. But these, of course, are all easy to
imagine drinking. Not so with a few other examples. In
seventeenth century France, the aristocracy would steep their brandy with

(08:12):
animal carcasses, frequently cats, to give the spirits a particular
musky aroma which the very wealthy prized. This wine of
the dead saw variations elsewhere, for instance the United States,
where men on the frontier would sometimes filter their harsh
frontier liquor through none other than a horse's intestines, in

(08:33):
the belief that it would help make it taste smoother.
Even in the modern era, there have been a number
of strange ways to get intoxicated. For instance, Victorian era
Russia favored keffer based kumis an alcoholic fermented mare's milk
which was known for its invigorating qualities. Southeast Asian snake
wine emerged during this era as well, involving entire venomous

(08:55):
serpents sealed within rice wine bottles, where toxins alleged neutralized
while imparting health boosting essences. Contemporary experimentation shows no sign
of diminishing. There are all sorts of numerous modern oddities,
including bacon vodka, pizza beer, liquor with any number of
insects or worms in the bottle. In Vietnam, for example,

(09:18):
there's a baby mouse wine, and I think you can
work that one out for yourself. In Japan, there's a
whiskey made with urine. One particularly hard to swallow cocktail
is found only at the Sour Dough Saloon in the
Yukon province of Canada called the sour Toe cocktail. Its
creation dates back to the Prohibition era, when a bootlegger

(09:39):
named Louis Lichen had to remove a toe due to frostbite.
Instead of throwing the toe out, this digit was placed
in alcohol for preservation. Years later, the toe found its
way into the tavern, where the local drunks made it
a rite of passage to do a shot of whiskey
with that mummified toe in it. The original toe has
long since gone missing, don't ask me where. Nobody really knows,

(10:01):
but don't worry. New toes, amputated for health reasons, have
been regularly donated to keep the tradition alive, and it's
still active. My friend Josh Gates drank a glass of
the stuff on an episode of Expedition Unknown. I'll just
have you watch that episode to see how it tastes. Now,
these cocktails are more than just drinks. They mark social boundaries.

(10:21):
They demonstrate hospitality through shared risk taking, They encode spiritual
beliefs about medicinal properties, and they protect cultural identity against
dominant norms. In short, they provide plenty of opportunity for
drinkers to engage in boundary crossing. Rituals that transcend everyday experience,
making the mundane briefly and sloppily sublime. All you need

(10:46):
to do is pick your poison. I hope you enjoyed
today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with Ihearts,
researched and written by the Grim and Mild team, and
produced by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and

(11:06):
the people who make it over at Grimandmild dot com
slash Curiosities. You'll also find a link to the official
Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online,
as well as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking
for an ad free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's
all the same stories, but without the interruption for a
small monthly fee. Learn more and sign up over at

(11:29):
patreon dot com, slash Grimandmild, and until next time, stay curious.