Atari Landfill

By Tyler Lake

Published April 24, 2026 at 12:00 PM EDT

Sunset over a sprawling landfill in black and white with a video game cartridge in the foreground — In the early 80's Atari dumped truckloads of games in a New Mexico landfill, in 2014 video game historians dug them up.

In 2014 a documentary crew, an academic, and some gaming legends unearthed video game history from a landfill. Actually, it was probably a mix of archeologists and backhoe operators that did the unearthing, but they were all there in Alamogordo New Mexico to find a treasure trove of Atari ephemera. Writer and educator Raiford Guins tells us the story of how a ton of gaming cartridges from the early 80’s ended up in a landfill in the southwest. In typical Guins fashion, he makes the point that the story that has been repeated, often involving the failure of one game, is more complicated than that.