The rusty steel arm and sharp-toothed bucket of an excavator preside menacingly over the Pit, which is a hundred feet wide and dug twenty feet down into the landfill. The filmmakers hustle around, a boom mic operator in a gas mask/respirator sort of thing and production assistants in goggles and everyone else with their faces wrapped in fully grunged bandannas, all looking quite a bit worse for the wear after a day in trash and heat. They’d used the daylight to remove the overburden of garbage above the spot where their amateur science suggests the tomb of videogames lies, but they’ve stopped short for the night. They’re saving the dramatic moment of discovery for tomorrow when a big crowd is expected to show up and gawk at the untombing. But tonight we’re staging part of the epiphany anyway. I stand with about twenty townies and VIPs along the edge of the Pit, getting arranged by height for an upcoming scene.
There’s the town mayor and some locals who claim to have raided the landfill and absconded with game cartridges when they were first dumped here back in 1983.
There’s Joe Lewandowski, our local garbage contractor and the ostensible protagonist of the documentary, a man who’s been hunting the exact location of the buried E.T. games for over a decade now.
There’s the director of the local civic center, who put me to trash duty when I was sentenced to so much community service in my youth. I make a point of shaking his hand and giving him a look that says something vengeful about us both ending up VIPs at the dump.
There’s Howard Scott Warshaw, who designed the E.T. videogame for Atari back in 1982.
There’s a writer named Ernest Cline, who wrote a book called Ready Player One, which revolves around the high-stakes world of a near-future virtual reality game, an immersive simulation in which many players totally lose themselves. The book glorifies all kinds of eighties pop culture and sold to Hollywood for big bucks. In their review of Ready Player One, The New York Times printed the word nerdgasm. The DeLorean belongs to Cline, whose role at the dig is unclear and unofficial but seems to be as some kind of Superintendent of the Nerdgasm.
Behind me some guys in hard hats are complaining about not getting to gather more data and do more analysis of the Pit before the public arrives tomorrow. They’re a group of self-proclaimed punk archaeologists who bullied their way into the dig by insisting that it has sufficient value as cultural heritage to deserve some measure of methodology. They work in the real world of stodgy academic archaeology, at universities and in private firms, but have, for whatever reason, taken a keen interest in this seemingly minor endeavor to make a spectacle of pop culture legend. But the filmmakers only brought the punk archaeologists along as an afterthought. Having actual archaeologists here makes sense like having a DeLorean here makes sense. The archaeologists will never get any control of the excavation but are the bookends of what drives this dig, an obsessive nostalgia for the Spielbergian eighties that begins with the nutball archaeology in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), runs through the soft sci-fi of E.T. (1982) and Back to the Future (1985), and ends with more nutball archaeology in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).*
So here we are arranged by height and told to avoid looking directly into the cameras. We’re told to glare into the bright lights, to gaze in collective wonder as Joe Lewandowski walks cautiously toward the source of that wonder-inducing light emanating from the Pit. We’re re-creating the obligatory Spielberg shot: a group of slack-jawed humans transfixed by the strange light of E.T. going home or a spaceship landing at Devils Tower or a horde of face-melting specters roaring out from the Lost Ark. For a moment I’m transported by it, totally in awe and a little bit frightened by the possibility of what might emerge, just the way I was back in the fifth grade when I first heard about the buried E.T.s.
It was years after the alleged burial and years before my parents let me have videogames in the house when I first heard older guys around the local comic-book store (shout-out to Evolution Comix over on Adams Avenue) talking about an E.T. game buried under our town. I didn’t immediately think of the Atari 2600’s toast-size plastic cartridges or the blocky eight-bit rendering of E.T. in what is commonly called the worst videogame of all time. I didn’t have videogames. I figured they were talking about a board game. I thought about Spielberg’s film, the story of young Elliott coaxing something alien and magical into his life with little more than curiosity and a trail of candy and then all of his buddies with him, tearing ass on their BMX bikes to save that magical creature from all the government poking and prodding and corporate exploitation. I was convinced that buried somewhere beneath our town was a game like Jumanji, meaning it was not a game at all but a portal that could transport me and my friends into the world of E.T., where we would ride our flying bikes across the face of the moon and wrest real magic from the vapid, corrupt grip of the adult world. In hindsight this was naïve, but it makes about as much sense as the real story behind the frenzy for digging up our landfill—how the rise of the gamer community, fueled by the furnace of internet rumor, made legend of the dump.
Here’s a rundown of that legend for those among us not already deep into the nerdgasm. Reports in the fall of 1983 from both the Alamogordo Daily News and The New York Times suggested Atari used Alamogordo as an industrial waste dump after deciding to retool its El Paso manufacturing plant amid a downturn in business. Everyone knew Atari needed to rid themselves of E.T. The game was widely considered totally craptastic. Its fatal flaw was a pit into which E.T. would repeatedly fall almost as soon as the game began—the pit from which few players could help poor E.T. escape, effectively nullifying any chance for them to enact the innocence-saves-magic narrative that had made the film so successful. So gamers were left pissed at the implication that they were too iniquitous to participate in the wonder or just pissed that they’d squandered $49.95, the equivalent of a whopping $122.17 today. They returned the cartridges in droves. Atari lost $100 million on the game. Even slashing prices to $1 didn’t help them sell, and E.T. became the first and biggest tremor in a quake that would crash the $3 billion videogame industry, bringing total industry sales to a mere $100 million by 1985 and totally bankrupting Atari. But the company refused to ever respond to reports of a massive, clandestine, and likely illegal precrash dump of their unwanted games or that the dump had been in Alamogordo, a town not far from the Trinity Site and Roswell. Atari’s silence over the years led some in the online gamer community to concoct conspiracies about a desert graveyard built specifically for millions of unsold copies of E.T.—an act of shame when the game proved a flop or an act of desperation to clear inventory as the company neared bankruptcy or the fated final point in a kind of Devil’s Triangle of the atom bomb and the UFO crash, an area in which all things paranormal congregate, where paranoia is the only useful state of mind, where all conspiracy culminates, a triangle of coordinates like the head of an arrow pointing directly from the underbelly of America toward the nation’s capital, where a lizard king inside a human-skin suit now sits in the Oval Office and orders drone strikes on other lizards not happy with their king’s slow play of targeted killings to wipe out the human race. Others in the gamer community found this kind of tale altogether implausible and denied any dump of any kind ever occurred, and so from the nerd squabbles of internet discussion threads rose an urban legend that has culminated in Microsoft’s Xbox Entertainment Studios funding a documentary that hinges on a bunch of us standing around on Easter Friday, knee-deep in all my town’s old trash in the middle of the night and staring slack-jawed into floodlights hanging over the Pit.
Most of us in the cast complain that the floodlights hurt when stared at for so long but we try to hold our eyeballs wide and endure the pain because the filmmakers tell us to. Tears stream down my face. I did not expect to cry at the dump. The tears are involuntary but I wonder if there is any good reason to sob. I’m reminded of Gehenna, the valley outside Jerusalem that in the time of Jesus was a garbage dump, that was often lit up at night with sanitation fires fueled by sulfur. And the fi
res became a convenient place to unceremoniously dispose of the bodies of criminals. In this manner the fiery disposal of miscreants became a convenient metaphor for God’s punishment of sinners. In this way the flames grew eternal and the name of the dump, Gehenna, eventually got translated by King James’s scribes as “hell.” In the beginning there was a garbage dump. That dump grew into humanity’s most sustained imagining of eternal horror. This seems a good thing to explain if people ask about my tears. Just meditating on a whole history of eternal suffering, I’ll say. But nobody asks. The documentary crew’s floodlights heat unearthed garbage until a sour, sulfurous smell taints the evening breeze.
The punk archaeologists behind me grumble about the smell but mostly complain that they’d rather be doing some kind of actual fieldwork than standing around staging scenes. I’m unclear about the exact nature of punk archaeology and what this crack team of scholars hopes to accomplish here but their subtle dissent earns my respect. They’re all business. Fuck the show. I dub them the Arch Punks in hopes that they will turn out to be a kind of motley superhero squad able to pull back the veil of this Hollywood spectacle. I abandon my original plan to doggedly tail the film’s director and instead resolve to fall in with the Arch Punks tomorrow morning. Beyond the oddness of replicating Spielberg’s paranormal sentimentality, the ethical quandary of staging scenes for a documentary, the whole history of hell, and the general weirdness of a small-town dump at night, the vibe here is uncanny and I suspect only the Arch Punks are divining it with me.
We do a half dozen takes of the epiphany scene, and when all our eyes are pretty well dripping out of our faces, we wrap for the night.
* * *
Eight a.m. on untombing Saturday and I drive through streetlights that mostly stay green and past signs that hype a man named Saint running for sheriff, past my old high school with teens hanging streamers for the night’s prom dance and past the Walmart where the streamers were no doubt bought in obscene bulk. On this morning turning right onto White Sands Boulevard will take you to the Earth Day celebration in Alameda Park, where streamers are a cardinal sin. Drive on in that direction and you’ll hit our town’s shopping mall, which is mostly abandoned these days except for Kmart, a military recruitment office, and a little museum that is—no joke—entirely dedicated to the Shroud of Turin, the leftovers of resurrection, the burial cloth of our Lord, who can absolve all sin. But I drive straight across the boulevard, over the railroad tracks, again to the landfill, where all the streamers from all the parties in Alamogordo got dumped along with everything else from the sixties on through 1989, when this bit of desert was finally full of our trash.
Maybe a hundred people are already standing single file at the gate, waiting to stare into the Pit. Civilization is about never running out of reasons to stand in lines. And make no mistake, we are in the midst of civilization. Though this legendary burial site is often described as “out in the middle of the desert,” the golden arches of the town McDonald’s practically loom over the landfill’s dirt road, and the line stretches back toward the boulevard and ends a hundred paces from the Hi-D-Ho Drive In. Most people in town couldn’t care less about the dig, but it has dominated the front page of the Alamogordo Daily News for the past three days:
Atari Graveyard: In Search of ‘E.T.’
‘E.T.’: Atari-Dig Contract Is Modified
‘E.T.’: Officials Discuss Dig Concerns
The concerns relate to the environmental hazards of digging up what was a largely unregulated landfill. A vocal faction in town is convinced the crew will accidentally unearth hundreds of corpses of mercury-laced hogs. In 1969 Alamogordo made national headlines when the family of Ernest and Lois Huckleby ate one of the many hogs they’d unknowingly fattened with grain doused in pesticides containing methylmercury. The U.S. Department of Agriculture quickly banned the use of mercury in pesticides when the Huckleby story broke, but it was too late for the family: the incident caused severe lifelong illnesses in the couple’s three children and prompted decades of ultimately unsuccessful civil litigation. A photo of eight-year-old Ernestine Huckleby filled a whole page of National Geographic in 1970, her eyes big as she grips a teddy bear, the caption informing us that she’s blind, mute, and paralyzed on account of the poisoned pork. “Clinging to life,” says the caption. Last year Ernestine’s brother, Amos, almost sixty and also blind and severely disabled from the mercury, was paraded before the city council in an attempt to stop the excavation of E.T.s. Be careful, he said. This stuff is dangerous. Is it worth it? Although hundreds of poisoned hogs and many thousands of pounds of mercury-tainted grain undoubtedly ended up in our landfill after the Huckleby incident, our garbage contractor, Joe Lewandowski, has promised that the hogs of ’69 aren’t buried near the E.T.s. of ’83. No cloud of poison will rise from the Pit, he finds himself saying more than he’d like. But no one seems too worried this morning—the line outside the dump is growing.
Simon Chinn, a two-time Academy Award–winning producer of the documentaries Searching for Sugar Man and Man on Wire, is producing this film through the media company Lightbox with the financial backing of Microsoft, which also plans to distribute the film through its Xbox consoles.* Because of Chinn’s pedigree, there’s hope this will be a decent flick about Atari and the rocky origins of the videogame industry, an industry that has in recent years all but eclipsed Hollywood in revenue and maybe cultural sway. Many die-hard gamers have driven cross-country to witness this first great excavation of the gaming age, convinced that one day all culture will stem from videogame culture, as if soon we’ll all be living inside a simulation or a giant Ready Player One virtual reality and we’ll only venture back into the real world to dig up Atari cartridges as part of a lame tour through the artifacts that jump-started our evolution away from flesh. They’ve brought their Atari games and wear their Atari shirts and their earnest fandom electrifies the morning. Others in line are curious locals, bewildered more than anything else, and seeing all of them lined up to stand around in their old trash seems an awful joke. The director of this film, Zak Penn, is known for his writing on the scripts of comic-book blockbusters such as X-Men: The Last Stand and The Avengers and maybe most infamously for writing the Schwarzenegger flop Last Action Hero. But Penn also once teamed with Werner Herzog to film a mockumentary about the Loch Ness monster and didn’t bother to let the Scottish locals in on the ruse. Few people saw Incident at Loch Ness, but I exerted the not-inconsiderable effort needed to find and watch it. My review: it is at worst a rude mockery of the local culture and at best totally inconsequential. But my method, as Sherlock Holmes would say, is founded on the observation of trifles.* And so here at the Pit I’m on the alert to sniff out a farce.
By 10:00 a.m. a gaggle of reporters has skipped the line. They’re hovering at the orange fence erected around the Pit, many of them wearing shiny new hard hats and safety vests still creased from their packaging. Some of that packaging is discarded on the ground and blowing around. I suppose, technically, that counts as proper disposal. A few TV reporters wear blouses and fancy jewelry, and one guy is in a full business suit. They’ve got big ideas about a glamorous time at the landfill. John Williams’s E.T. score plays through loudspeakers, and just for good measure, the DJ mixes in a few bars from Williams’s score for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Gamers fire up Atari 2600s on CRT televisions installed in the backs of their minivans. The wind gusts to match the growing pageantry of the scene. The DeLorean rolls up alongside the Pit.
When the game’s designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, arrives at the dump, his failure is all the media want to ask him about. He’s got a decent excuse: by the time Atari secured the rights to make an E.T. game in the fall of 1982, he had only six weeks to design it before a much-publicized Christmas release. He was rushed and doing a lot of drugs to try to keep up. The game suffered. But I hear him tell reporters over and over that he doesn’t mind people calling E.T. the worst videogame ever made because, look, it’s in the spotlight again after
all these years and that must count for something. He says this while gazing out over the Pit, whose name is a running joke about the fatal glitch in his game. I wonder if he’d refuse a chance to saddle up the DeLorean and travel back in time to fix the code. Aren’t we all supposed to be on the lookout for ways to fix what we’ve fucked up? But Warshaw also designed Yars’ Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, both Atari blockbusters compared to E.T. Plus, he’s now a psychotherapist, primarily counseling techies in Silicon Valley. He’s in the business of helping digital gurus alleviate problems with their organic networks, not through more technology but just through talking. He’s pretty much at peace, settled into his new role of fixing brains glitching from future shock.
The Arch Punks, on the other hand, are all nervous energy ready to blow. They’ve been here since sunrise, eager to start surveying and excavating and cataloging, but have been told to wait for the public to stream in, to wait for the cameras to start rolling. As best I can tell, punk archaeology is a DIY methodology meant to be nonelite and seat-of-the-pants. In some ways it’s a rebellion against academia, an attempt to keep archaeology relevant and sexy in the twenty-first century as the nature of our ruins is increasingly complicated by capitalism and globalism and technology’s acceleration of the cycle from commodity to waste. But I don’t fully understand the point.* E.T. and the other reportedly buried Atari games aren’t rare or valuable and it’s hard to fathom what the Arch Punks will learn through their excavation. But they take the work seriously and they’re constantly agitated by the film crew’s constrictive agenda, which makes the Punks a hoot to tail.
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