Hidden for three decades in a landfill deep in the New Mexico desert lie thousands of Atari cartridges from what is widely believed to be worst video game ever made – or so the urban legend goes.

A group of filmmakers hopes to unearth the truth Saturday by digging up the concrete-covered landfill in search of up to a million discarded copies of “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” that the game’s maker wanted to hide forever.

Additional Photos

Crews remove the upper layers of trash Friday at a landfill in Alamogordo, N.M., in preparation for Saturday’s dig for copies of the Atari game “E.T. The Extraterrestrial.” The Associated Press

The game and its contribution to the demise of Atari have been the source of fascination for gaming enthusiasts for 30 years, and the search for the cartridges will be featured in an upcoming documentary about Atari, the biggest video game company of the early 1980s.

“Bottom line, this is just trash. But there is a legend in it, we want to unlock that legend, that mystery,” said a spokeswoman for the public relations firm working on behalf of Xbox Entertainment Studios, one of the companies developing the film. The documentary is expected to be released later this year on Microsoft’s Xbox game consoles.

The event is expected to draw hundreds of game enthusiasts, pop culture fans and self-described geeks to Alamogordo, a small town in southeastern New Mexico.

Whether – and most importantly, why – Atari decided to bury thousands or millions of copies of the failed game is part of the urban legend and much speculation on Internet blog posts and forums.

Kristen Keller, a spokeswoman at Atari, said “nobody here has any idea what that’s about.” The company has no “corporate knowledge” about the Alamogordo burial. Atari has changed hands many times over the years, and Keller said, “We’re just watching like everybody else.” Atari currently manages about 200 classic titles such as Centipede and Asteroids. It was sold to a French company by Hasbro in 2001.

A New York Times article from Sept. 28, 1983, says 14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and computer equipment were dumped on the site. Local news reports from the time said that the landfill employees were throwing cartridges there and running a bulldozer over them before covering them with dirt and trash.

The city of Alamogordo agreed to give the documentarians 250 cartridges, or 10 percent of the cartridges found, whichever is greater, according to local media reports.

Tina Amini, deputy editor at gaming website Kotaku, says the game tanked because “it was practically broken.” A recurring flaw, she said, was that the character of the game, the beloved extraterrestrial, would fall into traps that were almost impossible to escape and would appear constantly and unpredictably.

Joe Lewandowski, who became manager of the 300-acre landfill a few months after the cartridge dump and has been a consultant for the documentarians, said they used old photographs and dug exploratory wells to find the actual burial site. A spokeswoman for Xbox said the upper layers of trash have been removed in preparation for Saturday’s dig.

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