THERE REALLY WAS AN ATARI BURIAL

Today one of gaming's greatest mysteries will be solved: Were millions of unsold Atari cartridges and hardware, including the infamous flop, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, really buried in the Almagordo, New Mexico desert? To find out, IGN's Fran Mirabella III and Naomi Kyle are on site at the big dig.

Why is this a big deal? Well, we explain why in this video over a game of E.T.:


The dig itself is part of an upcoming documentary that will be released exclusively on Xbox One by the newly formed Xbox Entertainment Studios. Directing the film is Avengers and X-Men 2 writer, Zak Penn.

The myth of the buried games was still in question just before the dig began; Zak Penn told IGN, "Other than garbage and the truth, I have no idea what we'll find. I think that's what's exciting, we won't know exactly what's down there until they start digging."

A brief history: In 1983, the New York Times and other papers reported 14 trucks of unsold Atari products were driven from a factory in El Paso to a landfill.

This represented the end of an era. With Atari's business in ruin (thanks to a number of flops, including E.T. and a shoddy port of Pac-Man) and the general public losing almost all interest in home console games, 1983 was a bleak year for the video game industry. What's become known as the "video game crash" was due in large part to Atari's collapse, and E.T. was Atari's final, and costliest, blunder of that era.

Although the burial was widely reported at the time, Atari employees, including Howard Scott Warshaw, the rushed programmer in charge of getting E.T. shipped in just 6 weeks (games took 6 months or more to make in the early 80s), have disputed the claim. Additionally, if anything was buried, it was crushed and paved over -- even before the elements took their toll. Whatever the case, E.T.'s journey from shovelware to shovel is an important historical story that finally has an ending.