An excavator finds Atari E.T. game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill.
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Film crew digs up decades-old E.T. game cartridges in New Mexico landfill

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

An excavation team dug up old Atari video game cartridges of the much-maligned E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game at a landfill in Alamogordo, N.M.

After three decades of speculation, a crew went to the landfill and unearthed the old cartridges after doing a huge amount of research for the Xbox original documentary Atari: Game Over.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.