There is something quietly vertiginous about walking through an exhibition and finding yourself already inside it. Not a self you remember putting there, but a self distributed across objects, images, words; a self that arrived in the museum before you did, and which now looks back at you from behind glass.
This happened to me at Göteborg’s Världskulturmuseet, where the exhibition “A World of Games” includes a display dedicated to the excavation of the Atari landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The photographs shown in that display are mine. My name appears alongside them as do the names of the team of archaeologists that I worked with. Nearby, video interviews with Andrew Reinhard — the archaeologist who led the excavation — play on a monitor. I stood in that gallery for some time, in a museum I had traveled to for reasons only partly connected to this material, trying to decide what I was experiencing. Neither pride, nor estrangement accurately describes the way I feel. The feeling was uncanny in the precise sense: familiar and foreign at once. I just stood there.
I have been thinking about that moment ever since, and about the other moments like it: standing before display cases in Rome, Sheffield, Málaga, Cambridge, and Shanghai, looking at what each museum had gathered to tell this story, trying to understand what the museums are doing with it, what questions the objects raise in their new institutional lives.
On these trips I would text my wife with some version of the same line: “more dig materials at _______.” And I would typically share how flummoxed I was at seeing such attention devoted to the recovered materials at museums the world over. The Atari Burial — as the disposal of the company’s products has come to be known — is even an exhibit at the Video Game Museum of CADPA in Shanghai. My perplexity, I told her, resided in my own skepticism: is this stuff really that important? I mean, sure, we unearthed a myth, hushed the rumors, quelled a legend, and unveiled all that infamous trash to major international media outlets. But…are all the recovered materials – including dirt from the actual pit – really that important to the history of games for museums to devote time, money, energy, and space to display smelly garbage to their visitors as historical artifacts? My wife’s response was blunt, and rather sobering: museums are telling you that the stuff is important. I stood corrected. It seemed best, on reflection, to cast off my skepticism and work to understand what work this stuff is doing in a museum.
This installment is my attempt at that understanding, conducted in dialogue with a framework that has long shaped my thinking about video games in museums: Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe’s 2010 essay “The Migration of the Aura, or How to Explore the Original Through Its Facsimiles,” published in Switching Codes (University of Chicago Press). Like the physical appearance of the excavated game cartridges themselves — distorted, smashed, eroded — I will not arrive at tidy conclusions. It is not the cracks in the plastic or the frayed packaging themselves that teach me anything; it is how museums curate that damage, what they choose to make of it, that becomes the object lesson.
Before the Ground Opened
I should establish my position in this story. I am not a neutral observer of the Alamogordo story. I am, in a modest but real sense, one of its authors, and the earliest critical one. My camera never fully recovered from all that sand.
In 2004, I published “Concrete and Clay: The Life and Afterlife of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600” in the journal Design and Culture, an article that took seriously what was then treated primarily as an industry fable: the claim that Atari, facing catastrophic losses after the collapse of the home console market in 1983, had buried millions of unsold cartridges — including unsold quantities of the notorious E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game — in a municipal landfill in southeastern New Mexico[i]. The story had circulated for two decades by then and had acquired in the telling all the features of urban legend: dramatic scale, corporate denial, with a location simply too good to be true — in the same state as Area 51 and the test site for the US’s first nuclear weapon. The persistent legend gave the industry crash a burial site. It made the failure literal, interred. I took it seriously as a cultural object regardless of whether it was literally true, because the rumor was doing real work in how game history was being made and remembered. I then devoted an entire chapter to the burial in Game After (MIT Press, 2014). I wrote about my images of Atari’s trash in Cabinet. I wrote about the culture of the excavation with game studies colleagues in Reconstruction. The team of archaeologists and I wrote about it in The Atlantic. Each venue asked something different of the material and of me, and each piece forced me to understand more precisely what I thought the legend meant. Now having it shown back to me at museums prompts even more considerations.
Latour and Lowe offer a concept I want to borrow here: the trajectory. Rather than asking whether any given object is an original or a copy — a question they argue is almost always the wrong one — they propose attending to the whole “catchment area” of a work: the river and all its tributaries, sources, and deltas. “A given work of art,” they write, “should be compared not to any isolated locus but to a river’s catchment, complete with its estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many meandering turns and its several hidden sources.” The Alamogordo story, thought through this lens, does not begin with the burial in 1983 or the excavation in 2014 — though for the locals who picked through the landfill at the time, there was no legend to wait for; they had the cartridges in hand. For everyone else, the story begins somewhere in the accumulation of rumors that circulated through game culture in the years between, before anyone put a shovel back in the ground. “Concrete and Clay” was a segment in that trajectory. So was every version of the story that preceded it, and every museum display and ongoing discourse that has followed.
What I want to hold onto, for now, is the implication that my decade of writing about the Alamogordo burial before the excavation took place was not merely prologue. It was part of the trajectory — part of what made the dig legible as a cultural event rather than a municipal curiosity. The rumor needed critical attention before it needed archaeological confirmation.
Going Underground
The excavation took place in April 2014. The city of Alamogordo granted permission for a dig organized by Fuel Entertainment, with documentary filmmaker Zak Penn present and a camera crew in tow — the resulting film, Atari: Game Over, was produced by the entertainment arm of Microsoft’s Xbox, and I appear in it. Penn had interviewed me in New York and invited me to Alamogordo; I came on my own dime. No one was flying me anywhere to discuss a thirty-year-old rumor about garbage. My role at the site was as historian and documentary photographer, a position that shaped how I moved through the event and what I paid attention to.
The cartridges themselves have stayed with me, and I have written about them at length elsewhere. But what I remember just as vividly is the crowd. In a piece I later co-wrote with Judd Ethan Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, and Carly A. Kocurek for the journal Reconstruction, we noted that people had driven for days to be there — one man told a camera crew he had come twenty-eight hours straight from Oregon, and when asked what he would do if the dig came up empty, replied gravely, “That would be bad.” Others arrived by Greyhound bus and then by taxi from town, which must have made for one of the stranger fares the driver had ever logged. The line to get in stretched for hundreds of people by the time the gates opened, long enough that families set up folding chairs and sent runners to the McDonald’s down the road. There were food trucks — one of them, painted lime green, advertised itself with the tagline “Order Some Disorder” — and a dig-side arcade improvised from a folding table, two old television sets, and a generator humming against the wind. People bought souvenir canteens printed with the excavation’s coordinates and an 8-bit foam sprite of E.T. We signed legally binding releases before we were allowed anywhere near the pit. It had, in other words, all the trappings of a small, temporary community organized around the possibility that a rumor might turn out to be true. We were all there to watch a story become true.
When the first cartridges appeared — dirty, degraded, some smashed, some of them still sealed in blister packs — the crowd reacted with a sound I am still not sure how to describe. It was not just a rousing cheer but something more like release, like the exhaling of a story that had been held thirty years too long. I took photographs throughout. I was thinking, at that moment, primarily about documentation — and about advocating that museums like The Strong National Museum of Play, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives receive whatever we recovered, if anything was there at all. I was not thinking about Göteborg, or Rome, or Sheffield. I was not thinking about what it would feel like, years later, to stand in a museum and find my images in an exhibit.
The cartridges that came up were not all E.T. The excavation recovered a wide variety of titles — the landfill was not simply an E.T. graveyard, despite what the legend had insisted. The condition of the materials varied considerably. Many were intact enough to be identified but showed clear signs of wear from having been jumbled with other trash underground in a sealed landfill — though at least one cartridge, astonishingly, booted up without trouble when plugged into an Atari 2600 on site. They were, in the most precise sense, excavated objects. Trash cum archaeological objects. They had been in the ground and now they were above ground.
Then they entered another kind of ground: the e-commerce market of eBay.
The Certificate of Authenticity Problem
Here is something that does not appear in the documentary, and that I find myself thinking about every time I stand in front of an Atari burial display at a museum: the City of Alamogordo issued official Certificates of Authenticity to accompany the recovered cartridges. These certificates were designed to distinguish cartridges genuinely recovered from the landfill from the millions of identical cartridges that have been circulating since their production in the 1970s and 80s. That is a reasonable problem to solve: without some authentication mechanism, a dirty E.T. cartridge pulled from a collector’s shelf is visually indistinguishable from one that spent thirty years underground (the latter will just smell worse).
The certificates were issued to accompany cartridges sold on eBay. Each listing came with a property tag, the certificate itself, and a pamphlet containing photographs from both the original 1983 dump and the 2014 dig, an authentication package of surprising elaborateness, assembled for a commercial marketplace. Which means that the museums now holding these objects — the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, OXO in Málaga, GAMM in Rome, and others — had to acquire them by bidding against private collectors on eBay. I think about that a lot: a museum, sandwiched between bids, treating a dead company’s garbage like a contested estate sale.
This is worth pausing on. The document that confers institutional legitimacy on these objects was produced for a marketplace. Museums became one category of bidder among others. I picture a curator hunched over a laptop at 11 p.m., refreshing a listing.
The Henry Ford Museum received its materials differently: the Henry Ford came directly to the archaeology team. My hard hat from the dig is in the Henry Ford collection, alongside other excavation artifacts including actual dirt from the pit. The Henry Ford’s mandate is American industrial and technological history: its collections include the Rosa Parks bus, the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. My hard hat keeps unusual company. That a hard hat from the Alamogordo dig sits in that company is a version of this event that game-specific museums cannot produce, and it is the version that perhaps takes most seriously what the excavation was: a moment in American business and technology history, not just game history.
Back to the certificate. Latour and Lowe are useful here, though not in the way one might expect. They argue strenuously against the obsession with pinpointing originals, against the idea that the meaningful question is, “is this the real thing?” The Certificate of Authenticity performs exactly that obsession in bureaucratic form. It is a municipal government’s attempt to freeze the original/copy distinction — to say, officially, this cartridge is from the landfill, and this one is not — at precisely the moment when, as Latour and Lowe would have it, that is the wrong question. The more interesting question is what any given museum does with its version of the object once acquired. The certificate answers a question about provenance. It has nothing to say about meaning.
Still, I do not want to dismiss it entirely. The dirt on these cartridges matters. The wear matters. The time spent underground does as well. The specific history of burial and recovery matters, even if it cannot be read directly from the object without supplementation. The certificate is a clumsy instrument for preserving something Latour and Lowe would recognize as worth preserving: not the object’s claim to be original, but the specific trajectory that brought it here. A cartridge dug out of the Alamogordo dirt and a cartridge that has sat on a collector’s shelf since 1983 are materially the same object; what distinguishes them is everything that happened to each one in between. The problem is that the certificate enlists this distinction in service of a market rather than in service of understanding.
End of Part 1
[i] I did a follow-up piece for the USC journal, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, in 2006 that utilized the phrase “undead media” to address surviving coin-op arcade games. The landfill legend played a role in that article; namely via the account of the landfill shared in D.B. Weiss’s novel Lucky Wander Boy. The funny thing is that I just searched my essay in Vectors entitled, “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead,” to see how to access it given that the journal was built in Flash. Here’s what Gemini shared: “The irony of the piece is that “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead” has itself fallen victim to the exact digital obsolescence and “media death” that Raiford Guins wrote about. Because the Vectors Journal interface was built entirely on Adobe Flash, the original interactive format is now broken on modern browsers.” Bravo, Gemini, bravo.
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