One of the more predominant effects of the 1983 crash was on Atari . In 1982 , it had published large volumes of Atari 2600 games that they had expected to sell well , including a port of '' Pac-Man '' and game adaption of the film '' E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial '' . However , due to the quality of these games and other market factors , much of Atari 's production did not get sold . In September 1983 , Atari discreetly buried much of this excess stock , as well as unsold stock of earlier games , in a landfill near Alamogordo , New Mexico , though Atari did not comment about their activity at the time . Misinformation related to sales of '' Pac-Man '' and '' E.T. '' led to an urban legend of the Atari video game burial that millions of unsold cartridges were buried there . Gaming historians received permission to dig up the landfill as part of a documentary in 2014 , during which former Atari executives clarified that only about 700,000 cartridges had been buried in 1982 , backed by estimates made during the excavation , and disproving the scale of the urban legend . Despite this , Atari 's burial remains an iconic representation of the 1983 video game crash
Atari video game burial
Atari video game burial
Video game crash of 1983