The event became a cultural icon and a reminder of the video game crash of 1983; it was the end result of a disastrous fiscal year which saw Atari, Inc. sold off by its parent company Warner Communications.

In 2014, Fuel Industries, Microsoft, and others worked with the New Mexico government to excavate the site as part of a documentary, Atari: Game Over.

Only a small fraction, about 1,300 cartridges, were recovered, with a portion given for curation and the rest auctioned to raise money for a museum to commemorate the burial.

[8][9] However, the finished product, released in March 1982, was critically panned for its poor gameplay,[2] and although it became the console's best-selling game after shipping 7 million units, it left Atari with over 5 million unsold cartridges—a problem compounded by the high rate of customers returning the game for refunds.

[8][10] Further to the problems caused by Pac-Man's underwhelming sales, Atari also faced great difficulty as a result of its video game adaptation of the film E.T.

It was later reported that Warner had paid $20–25 million for the rights, which was at the time a high figure for video game licensing.

[8] The task of developing the game fell on Howard Scott Warshaw, the programmer for Raiders, but due to lengthy delays in the licensing rights, Warshaw had only five weeks to make a full game to make sure Atari could sell it during the upcoming holiday period.

However, video game sales in 1982 had slowed, and distributors who had ordered en masse in expectation of high turnover were left to simply return large quantities of unsold stock to Atari.

As a result, the company soon found itself in possession of several million essentially useless video game cartridges, which it would be entirely unable to sell.

The Times article did not specify the games being destroyed, but subsequent reports generally linked the story of the dumping to the well-known failure of E.T.

[16] Starting on September 29, 1983, a layer of concrete was poured on top of the crushed materials, a rare occurrence in waste disposal.

[24] Writing for the Pacific Historical Review, John Wills speculated that location's place in the public psyche—its proximity to the sites of both the Trinity nuclear test and Roswell UFO incident—aided the popularity of the story.

[30] The incident has also become something of a cultural symbol representative of the video game crash of 1983, often cited as a cautionary tale about the hubris of poor business practices,[31][32][33] despite suggestions that the burial allowed the company to write off the disposed-of material for tax relief purposes.

Weiss features a scene which takes place outside of Alamogordo, in which two of the characters discuss a parking lot which has been built over the site of the burial.

[38] On May 28, 2013, the Alamogordo City Commission granted Fuel Industries, a Canadian entertainment company, six months of access to the landfill to film a documentary, Atari: Game Over, about the burial and to excavate the dump site.

[42] E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial designer Howard Scott Warshaw, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline, and film director Zak Penn attended the event as part of a documentary about the burial,[43] as did local residents such as Armando Ortega, a city official who was reportedly one of the original children to raid the dump in 1983.

[48][49] A team of archaeologists was present to examine and document the Atari material unearthed by excavation machinery: Andrew Reinhard (American School of Classical Studies at Athens), Richard Rothaus (Trefoil Cultural and Environmental), Bill Caraher (University of North Dakota), with support from video game historian Raiford Guins (Stony Brook University) and historian Bret Weber (University of North Dakota).

[50] Only about 1300 cartridges of the estimated 700,000 were removed from the burial, as the remaining materials were deeper than expected, which made them more difficult to access, according to Alamogordo mayor Susie Galea.

[54][55] Of the recovered materials, a fraction has been given to the New Mexico Museum of Space History for display, and another 100 to the documentary producers Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment.

The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England also received some artifacts from the desert, which are on permanent display in the museum gallery.