Bonus Episode: The Landfill

A waste management specialist unearths thousands of Atari games buried in a New Mexico landfill. As gaming historians rejoice, he plots to turn Atari’s unwanted trash into cash.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
When people reminisce about Atari, they talk about the incredible
box art or the addictive gameplay. But one thing we
haven't covered is the smell. The terrible, terrible smell.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
I had one guy in Rhode Island and bought one
who was worried about was it. When he got into
his house, opened up the zick blank bag and the
smell came out. He immediately wrote me it says, is
this hazardous? Is my whole family gonna die? And he
was somewhat serious.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
That's Joe Lewandowski. Joe is a sanitation specialist in the
city of Alamagordo, New Mexico, and what he's describing is
the old factory sensation one gets when they're confronted with
an Atari game cartridge that has a very special provenance.
These were games that were dug up from a landfill
in twenty fourteen after idling there for more than thirty years.

(00:53):
They had been dumped by Atari during the video game
crash Unwanted, Unloved Games. Throughout the years, this disposal has
developed into an urban legend, with some people doubting whether
it had ever actually happened, and others insisting it had.
Like a lot of these stories. It grew bigger over
time that Atari hadn't just dumped a few titles, but

(01:17):
I had been on a clandestine mission to bury millions of
their very maligned et game. But Joe knew the truth.
He was there when the games were buried back in
nineteen eighty three, and he was the one who was
able to locate the dump site decades later where hundreds
of thousands of games had been laid to rest. Once excavated,

(01:39):
they were prized by collectors for being a key part
of Atari history, even if they carried with them the
literal stench of failure.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
In fact, the games I said to the Vigamous Museum
in Rome, Italy. They set up a whole room with them,
and they'd set up a beautiful display. You can see
it online. It's one of the best presentations of the story.
They were joking about it. Every one of them had
two odor eaters underneath the game, trying to absorb the smell.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
But in order to get those legendary buried games, Joe
would have to grapple with city bureaucracy. He'd have to
find out their exact burial spot, and he'd have to
contend with the people of Alama Gordo who believe digging
them up might mean releasing toxic waste into the air.
But Joe, like a lot of gamers, loves a challenge

(02:28):
for iHeartRadio. This is the legend of sword Quest. I'm
your host, Jamie Loftus, and this is a bonus episode.
The landfill like bad produce at a grocery store. That's
how Atari executive Bruce Enton explained Atari sending truckloads of games,

(02:50):
systems and other waste from their facility in El Paso,
Texas to Alamagordo, New Mexico. It was a journey of
about ninety miles that lasted over the course of a
few days in September nineteen eighty three. Most of the products,
he said, were defective and had nothing to do with
reports of an ailing video game industry, even though somewhere

(03:12):
between nine and twenty truckloads of Atari merchandise were hauled over.
Of course, this was what people in politics call spin.
The literal tons of games being routed to Alamagordo were
unsold and unwanted, the result of a manufacturing glut. Atari
was in real trouble, but they couldn't say that, so

(03:34):
the dump. Trucks full of games were waved away as
the electronic equivalent of misfit toys. Alamagordo is a city
known mostly for its proximity to White Sand's missile range,
where J. Robert Oppenheimer looked on as the US military
tested the first atomic bomb, and for having what's believed
to be the world's biggest pistachio sculpture. It wasn't exactly

(03:56):
thought of as a place to dump excess video game inventory.
So why there. For one thing, Atari paid the landfill
to take their trash about three hundred to five hundred
dollars per truck. For another, there was a landfill rule
that benefited Atari. Here's Joe Lewandowski.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
The reason they brought them to al mcgardo is New
Mexico had a no scavenging law that they wouldn't allow
you to scavenge at landfills. Texas did not have that.
So Texas landfills, when you drove in the empty trucks,
there'd be people standing around waiting for you to push
those loads out of your truck, and you know, just
like flies, they just right on the pile, ripped it

(04:38):
all to pieces and reused to recycle. Not half of
what you just dubbed that wasn't allowed in New Mexico. Plus,
Atari was trying to keep it secret because you can
imagine if the stockholders of Atari found out that their
company was throwing things away, brand new product, why would
that do to the stock I mean, there'd be a
bigger crash than it was already happening. So that's the

(04:58):
reason they were trying to keep it.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
So, of course, just because there was a no plundering
rule doesn't mean anyone respected it. To some landfill games
meant free games. Local teens began raiding the site, digging
up cartridges they were hoping to resell with a nice
one hundred percent profit margin. That's because they didn't have
to dig too deep.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
So basically each night there was no more than six
inches of dirt or even less sometimes on top of
whatever you put in that day, so they were right there.
They just move a little bit of dirt and they
were solid. They put them all in the same spot.
In fact, they diverted the trucks to another part of
the cell and this trench the regular garbage while they
were putting in the Atari.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
The Atari trench was about one hundred feet long thirty
to forty feet wide. It eventually got pretty deep, but
initially scavengers only needed to dig down a few inches,
or maybe not dig at all. One news report said
that some kids chased down a trash compactor, grabbing games
that were falling off the back and trying to sell them.

(06:03):
There was even a rumor someone had hijacked one of
the trucks, though that one probably isn't true.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Then there was a seventy year olds and the twelve
year olds that snuck in the middle of the night
and distracted the security guard and jumped in and got
them history teacher here. Now, Megordo was a teenager back
then rode in on motocross bikes from the backside. Police
pulled over a pickup truck with three teenagers so full
the games were just falling off the sides of the
truck as they were going down the street. So yeah,

(06:30):
the games everybody kind of knew. I knew one of
the supervisors from the other company that was actually running
the landfill at the time. He had a shed just
stacked all the way from back to front, loaded all
right to the door the thing. So yeah, the games
went everywhere.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
One newspaper even joked the landfill was turning into a
shopping mall. Pretty soon. Atari had security at the dump.
One guard carried a broom handle, walking the perimeter and
ready to swat any potential resellers. City officials or that
concrete be poured over it to discourage looting.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
That's why you can call it also the Atari tomb,
because they did put concrete, but that was not part
of the original plan. When scavengers were getting them, they
tried to put concrete over them to keep the scavengers
from getting through, and that didn't slow anybody down either.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
All of this was pretty common knowledge at the time,
but as the years went on it seemed to take
on a kind of legend, one that some people discounted entirely,
mostly because no one at Aitari ever clarified the story
or even wanted to comment much on it. It grew
to the point that it was not only Atari games,

(07:38):
but specifically ET, the infamously bad game based on the
movie that had to be trucked to the landfill. It
fits so well with the mythology because supposedly ET was
solely responsible for the video game crash. The truth is
a lot of bad games and too many games were
to blame for the crash of games wound up at

(08:01):
the landfill, but some people doubted even that, and over
time Joe listened with some amusement as people debated whether
it ever even happened.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Because you know, most of the stuff on the internet
was a big war between gamers that it never happened.
It's all a myth, it's an urban legend, never happened.
Even Atari denied it happened. And then there's the other
ones that totally believed it was there, and somebody needs
to dig them up, and you know, somebody needs to
find them and all this other stuff.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
So Joe knew without a doubt the games were there.
While he wasn't working for the exact waste management company
that dumped it. He was in the business at the time.
Joe is an Alamgordo lifer. Raised there.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, back then, actually I owned one of the garbage companies,
and I had beat the other garbage company and they
had sold out to us in August of eighty three.
This dump happened in September of eighty three. They were
still running the landfill. We were merging the two companies together.
So how I found out about is one of my
drivers came in and said, used to see what's going
on at the dump. So I drove out, saw the
semi truck there unloading brand new games. It wasn't just games,

(09:10):
there was also the twenty six hundred console and the
whole controllers, everything that was all brand new stuff, and
grabbed a few, went back to work and forgot about it.
Since nineteen eighty three, emeyb Once in a while somebody would
ask me and they said, hey, yeah, yeah, it happened.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Eventually, around twenty ten, Joe decided there might be merit
in busting the myth once and for all. Why not
mount a kind of archaeological expedition becoming the Indiana Jones
of Atari trash. Joe's not much of a gamer, but
the challenge of it appealed to him, and it was
a challenge. For one thing, it's a big landfill, three

(09:45):
hundred acres, and back then no one was keeping track
of what trash was dumped where.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
There were no survey points, there was no GPS markers
or anything else. That was really the challenge. It's three
hundred acres looking again for something that's one hundred feet long,
thirty feet wide, four feet thick underground thirty feet somewhere
in the middle of the desert, and that whole area
had changed as that time. A bypass went in, other
buildings went in, hot air balloon park went in, so

(10:13):
it wasn't what it was in nineteen eighty three. So
that was really the challenge. Could it be found in
all this?

Speaker 1 (10:19):
The other problem was getting approval. One doesn't just go
rummaging around in a landfill. Joe needed permission from the city,
the governor, and the environmental Protection agency. He also had
to address some serious potential consequences of digging around in there.
Back in nineteen sixty nine, pigs that had inadvertently been

(10:40):
fed mercury laced seed were tossed into the landfill, and
there was concern that they could still pose a health hazard.
That site wasn't in the general area where Joe thought
the games were, but it still had to be investigated
with air samples taken by an environmental firm. The city
also had to be reassured that some buried melia in
a pesticide wasn't present in the barrels nearby, or that

(11:04):
munitions from White Sand's missile base wouldn't be dug up
and explode. This took Joe, believe it or not, a
few years to navigate.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
I got other things to be doing, and then when
the environmental start hit me on it, it was like
it was almost like again another challenge, like you say
I can't do it, Well, I'm going to do it.
So that's what happened was is I think they actually
helped give me the motivation to continue where I might
have got bored with the story.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
By that time, he had connected with the documentary project
founded by Fuel Entertainment and production company Light Box. They
wanted to make a movie about the excavation, hoping to
either debunk the urban legend or prove it to be true.
Fuel Entertainment received permission from the city Council in twenty
thirteen to dig. That project, which was eventually funded in

(11:55):
part by Microsoft to use his content for their Xbox service,
would be able to help subsidy the effort. The dig
wound up costing about fifty thousand dollars. Before the actual dig,
Joe and the crew used ground penetrating radar, which revealed
between sixty and seventy different trenches, but the city wouldn't
just let him drill test holes in everyone.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
That's kind of a dangerous situation. So they told me
I had to get it down to two, and I
was stuck until my wife said something silly and said
what about the scrap book? And I was like, what
about the scrap book? And I've been self employed since
nineteen eighty one. She made scrapbooks of all the companies
we had different things I went on. So I went
up in the attic and got this scrap book from
Alamo Wasaye the company that we're talking about, And in

(12:42):
there was actually some old polaroids showing they weren't about Atari.
There were polaroids about doing improvements and construction at the
landfill out there. And it didn't show me where Atari was,
but it gave me some angles of some buildings in
the background. I had the l Paso Times, the only
photograph of the event I had that I took that

(13:03):
put them all on a Google image with clear overlays,
threw straight lines till all these lines started to intersect.
That gave me an idea. I got it down to two.
Then the Environment department at that point said okay, you
can do the test holes.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
Now, the test holes revealed garbage that could date the
trench to September nineteen eighty three, some newspapers that kind
of thing. Then came socks and care bears and bumper
stickers and all sorts of other trash, so Joe knew
they were likely in the right place. To be clear,
this wasn't a one person operation. There was the documentary

(13:38):
team as well as cultural archaeologists and equipment operators, but
it's also true that without Joe's expertise, none of them
were probably going to accomplish much. So in April twenty fourteen,
Joe and the crew started digging and digging. A small
crowd of curious gamers was roped off, though no one

(13:59):
threatened them with a broom handle this time. Howard Scott Warshaw,
who programmed ET, was invited to witness it, presumably as
some kind of therapeutic closure. And then there was the concrete.
Though there wasn't much of it to smash through. It
didn't seem like much was poured, just enough to somewhat
discourage teenaged looters in nineteen eighty three, and then games

(14:22):
began getting pulled up. There was ET, of course, but
plenty of other games, good games too, Centipede, Raiders of
the Lost Arc Adventure, and a lot of them in
good condition. Some of them were even still in multi packs,
meaning they were either headed to or coming back from retailers.

(14:43):
That was in sharp contrast to a tory's claim that
the games were the equivalent of rotten vegetables. In all,
Joe retrieved one thousand, three hundred and eighty eight games,
along with consoles and controllers. The story was absolutely true.
A tar had buried the sins of their gluttony in Alamgordo.

(15:04):
But when the cameras were off and the documentary team left,
there was an outstanding question, what do you do with
one three hundred and eighty eight foul smelling games you've
liberated from a landfill. About one hundred of the games
were given to crew members of the movie, but the

(15:26):
vast majority belonged to the city of Alamagordo. These games
weren't worthless, not even close. Any Atari game will fetch
at least a couple of dollars, but certain titles, especially
rare or packaged ones, can be collector's items. This stash
in particular, was unique. It was a part of Atari's

(15:46):
history really part of its grand finale. So despite their stench,
Joe knew they'd be appealing to vintage game collectors. But
it turned out that some were already up on eBay
just hours after he had dug them up.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
When I looked on eBay, there was fakes on there.
You could tell there were fakes. You know, they didn't
weren't even good fakes. Somebody had taken some Atari games
and boxes and just ran over with a pickup truck.
You can see the tire prints on the game box,
and they were trying to sell them as from the
Atari gig.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
Naturally, some of the games were crushed, the real ones,
not just the fake ones, but others were incredibly well
preserved thanks to the new Mexico climate, and so Joe
began putting the real games up on eBay.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
So I sold eight hundred games, and at that point
they went to eighteen different countries and forty seven of
the United States States because I, like I said, I
tracked everywhere every one of them went. So they went
to Brazil and Morocco and Indonesia and France and Germany, Italy,
all over the world. It was just amazing how people

(16:57):
wanted these and the story.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Some sold for a little money, some for a lot.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
So I mean cartridge themselves. They were selling them about
about one thousand dollars apiece. At the lowest was eight
hundred dollars et in the box. The first round they
averaged a little about twelve hundred, and the highest paid
at that time was one three hundred and twenty five
dollars for an et in the boxes individual out of Portland,

(17:26):
Oregon that paid the highest for one. So ET's were
in the thousand dollars range all the way across the board,
nothing less, and the others raised anywhere from some fifty
dollars ones up. In fact, I had a lot of
components that I didn't even know what they were, internal components,
and some were just the cartrige case with no components
busted up. I even bagged those up, said twenty five dollars.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Not all of the games were sold, considering their cultural value,
some were given away to museums around the world.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
You know, Frankfurt, Germany. Rome, they're ten blocks from the
Vatican in Rome. At the Bigamous they're in the space
Sonia and Henry Ford, the Strong Ontario and so anything
that was museum related. I'd send them packages of you know,
six or seven games documentation.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
That first sale brought in around one hundred and eight
thousand dollars. In twenty twenty two, Joe dipped into his
second batch of two hundred and eighty games, and again
collectors were happy to oblige him, so.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
They sold two to three times what they were going
for the first time, ET went up to twenty four
hundred dollars. The ET did jump from the high up
one time at thirteen jumped to twenty four hundred dollars.
And I doubt if you can touch one now for
less than four or five thousand dollars, if you can
find one, because the other thing is very few were
being resold. You know, these people that bought them wanted

(18:48):
them for a lot of reasons. And that was another
interesting part of the story.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
Too good point, after all, why buy literal trash games that,
if they were actually in better shape, might cost a
lot less?

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Why did people buy them? Individual and Rhode Island, who
had several palsy was in the shriner's hospital, told me
he played Atari while he was in there. The nurses
made him play Atari, which he loved doing anyway, and
I said, oh, yeah, just keep you busy. So he
didn't drive the nurses crazy. He says, no, it's a
medical tool hand eye coordination. They actually use it as
a medical tool to get kids to use it to

(19:23):
get their hands and their eyes to work together.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
All told, roughly two hundred thousand dollars was raised from
the sale of the game cartridges, but the money didn't
go into his pocket. The games were a part of
Alamagordo's lure as much as they were Atari's. The funds
were put back into the city to address some long
standing projects they had never gotten the necessary money to tackle.
Joe and his wife, Deborah, are both volunteer members of

(19:48):
the Tularosa Basin Historical Society, which is dedicated to preserving
local history. The reason Joe pursued the dig was not
only for the challenge, but because of a deal he
struck with the city.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
I just went and said, here's what I'm willing to
do to tell this story. It's kind of an interesting story,
publicity wise and everything. And then as I went through it,
I dropped that and said, listen, I'll find them as
long as I can decide where the money goes. I
don't really want the money. What I want is the
money to go into the things in albal Gordo, not
potholes or you know, fixing roads or anything like that.

(20:23):
I wanted something when we're done that there's still something
there that you can know that Theatari paid for it.
This whole adventure paid the deal. So that's the deal
I negotiated with the city. I'll do all this. When
the money comes in, I'll tell you where the money's
going to go, and then that money would go there.
And that's what we did with this.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
On that, this and that turned out to be a lot.
Some of the money went to Ala Mcgordo, including money
meant to recoup the cost of the dig, but the
rest went to local projects.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
What I did on the first round of eight hundred games.
Money went to the Alba Gorda Library for some improvements there,
to the police department for training equipment and other things
that they needed, things that they normally in their budget
and they have to really scrounge to get enough money
to buy and so this gave them that flush fund
to buy stuff that they needed but could never afford.

(21:15):
The Zoom took an old building renovated it into a
new monkey barn in which we have new Brazilian monkeys
and some other things there in there, and then money
to the Historical Society, the local Historic Society, to the
local museum, so it's distributed that time around to those
four entities.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
The games also helped with the ongoing restoration of the
Dady School, which was originally established to teach English to
Spanish speaking students before they moved on to public schools,
effectively segregating them for a period of time. Full desegregation
for all students didn't happen until nineteen forty nine, but
Joe hopes the property can have a new different life,

(21:54):
both as a community hub and a place to learn
about its challenging history.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Was on the condemnation list, was about to be torn down.
It's an old adobe from that time period. We able
to get it off that, and then I was able
to make I raise all the funding I needed to
get the thing, not just the Atari money, the National
Endowment money, city money, donation money that we're actually restoring
the whole thing into a community center in Park, so
it'll be the Dudley School Community Center and Park now,

(22:22):
and there will also be a museum telling that story,
tell her why this building, why about that time.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Today Joe is down to just a handful of cartridges,
about one hundred and twenty of them. Joe things still
remain in storage. He personally kept about a dozen. But
he's not much of a gamer, so he chose games
he remembers from what was popular in arcades, Space Invaders, Centipede,
and of course he had to grab Etea And no,

(22:51):
there's no chance that Landfall contains the missing sword Quest prizes.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
Now, we didn't find anything like that. Now, we found
the various sword Quest because we all say sword Quest,
but you gotta look a little clos there's earth, there's water,
and there's different versions of it. And we had three
of the four versions that came out because we did
have I had people, but you just brought up the
same thing that were hardcore sword Quest individuals that had

(23:16):
to have that game. That was another top selling one
because of that, you know that situation, because none of
the other games had variations, you know what I mean.
The sword Quest was four different types of games, but
it was still sword Quest. No, none of the other
games did that. And so now I'd heard about it
you know, there's no way that something like that would

(23:37):
have ended up in the warehouses in El Paso.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
According to Joe, there may be as many as eight
hundred thousand games left in the landfill, but the city
is never going to authorize another Atari dig. That's why
collectors paid a premium. The supply for an Alamgordo original
is limited.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
So yeah, I know exactly how many came out. There's
still seven hundred and ninety two thousand more down there,
but the dig will never happen again. The environ department
in the city both said no one will ever be
allowed to go, and I wouldn't assist anybody if they
wanted to anyway, because that would ruin the value of
the ones that the people that bought.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
In a way, Atari collapsed, so Alamgordo could rise a little.
At least. The games might all be gone, but their
legacy lives on in Alamgordo's historical buildings and community attractions.
And yes, in the unique smell of an original Alamagordo
Atari game.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
You'll know it came out of the dump because it
still has that that smell, basically musky garbage. Again, the
garbage didn't make it in it, but it was buried
under twenty six feet of garbage over the top of it.
And we have them in the local museum and I
go down there right now pull one out. Or actually,
when we open up the glass doors there's a little
bit of a whiff that still comes out. And that's

(24:55):
many years, you know, nine years later. So no, it's
something it doesn't really go completely away, but it's controllable.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
So if you're ever in the market for an official
Alamgordo atari game, do a quality check and make sure
it smells terrible.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart
Podcasts and School of Humans. This episode was written by
Jake Rosson and hosted by Jamie LOFTUS producers are Miranda
Hawkins and Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elc Crowley,
Brandon Barr, and Jason English. Our show editor is Mary Doo.
Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by

(25:41):
Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson. Original score by Jesse Niswanger.
This episode was sound designed by Jonathan Washington, with additional
editing by Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Miranda Hawkins.
Show logo by Lucy Quintonia