Burying E.T.

2023

Burying E.T. is a video game for the Atari 2600 that recounts an event that took place in 1983.. That year, Atari had just released a game adapted from the film E.T. The game was mediocre and sold very poorly. The mediocre game sold poorly, and Atari decided to get rid of unsold cartridges by burying them in a landfill in New Mexico. This episode was seen as a symbol of the great crash of the fledgling video game industry in 1983. The story became an urban legend until, in 2014, excavations unearthed the cartridges and proved the reality of this event.

In this game for the Atari 2600, the player in command of a bulldozer must bury the cartridges from the E.T. game on the Atari 2600 in the desert of New Mexico. It's a game on a specific machine that tells a real story linked to that same machine, in the manner of Robert Morris's Box with the sound of its own making.

The installation consists of a screen, a glass cube filled with New Mexico sand, inside which is buried the computer running the game, and a joystick. A real-fake box of the game and a video of the fake advertisement for it are also presented, to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Burying video game cartridges in the desert, beyond the quasi-funerary ritual that it represents, also echoes the Anthropocene, that geological epoch of ours in which mankind has had an irreparable impact on the planet, and in which plastic particles can even be found in geological strata. It's also a reflection on technological obsolescence and the waste it generates, as well as the lack of interest in preserving the cultural industry artifacts that are video games.