Stingray

Moycon, you continue to crack me up. I love your super close zoom in shot. I may use that on the landfill page. I finally heard back from the guy I emailed yesterday and he has given me permission to quote him. The entire email is here. He is John-Michael Battaglia and was the Senior Copy Writer at Atari in 1982 & 1983. The manuals that he did include Football, Space Dungeon, Phoenix, WaterWorld, and Adventure. Here are a few quotes from the email: A Cuttle Cart/ Croco Cart years ahead of it's time! He also said that he might have the unused E.T. brochure cover in the attic, and will scan it for us if he comes across it. -S

My wife will play a game or two of Ms. Pac-Man or Centepede on my MAME cab (depending on which control panel is on it at the time). Those are about the only two video games she ever plays. -S

Was just fooling around with google maps. Using the info that I got from that last video that Spud posted, I was able to locate the landfill area very easily. Here's a picture of the landfill pretty well centered. For reference, the grey circular shape toward the top right is the natural gas storage facility that was pointed out on the video. Near the bottom left you can see what surely must be trails made by the ATV & dirt bike riders that the gentlaman in the video referred to. -S

Sorry for the delay, my laptop's hard drive melted down a couple days ago and I just set up an alternate machine this morning. The promised email will be sent when I get home tonight. If I hear back, I'll post to this thread straight away. If I don't, I'll unleash a snail mail volley in the general direction of Texas. Have you heard anything yet? I started to send a snail mail letter to this person, but I thought I'd check with you first to see if you already did that. -S

I'm a believer now too. Hope to hear more about this in the near future. -S

Okay, just because I wouldn't buy a system at launch the last thing I would ever do would be discourage my wife from buying me video game stuff. -S

Oh and for the record, I'm 35 and don't know the first thing about the stock market. Don't assume that everyone in the world shares your interests. -S

People keep arguing with me don't they. That's because you're deliberatly trying to be offensive. I don't know, nor do I care which handheld outsells the other. I further don't care if the DS is discontinued after xmas. I plan to own both, I plan to own the next Gameboy. I don't care which company does better than the other financially. All I care about is the fact that they both make great handheld video game systems, and games that I want to play. -S

I never buy a console at launch. I always wait until at least the first price drop. -S

Spud's latest video has been added to the landfill page. I also did a transcript with still images. -S

I actually liked that movie. I think I'll wait and hear what Maibock thinks of this game before I buy it though. I've long ago lost all of my faith in EA. -S

I see common 2600 games all the time. Even rareish ones pop up pretty frequetly. -S

All of them. -S

I heard back from this guy. I replied asking permission to quote his response, so I don't want to do that until he does get back to me. The essence of it was that he was not there (he was involved in producing manuals so there's no reason why he would have been), but that he did hear the story and believed it to be true. There's also a fairly amusing twist involved here so I do hope that he gives me permission to quote him. -S

A few hours of near aimless wandering around the wacky wide web (what do you mean I should be working at work?) has produced these tidbits: Found a 1984 interview with James Morgan. He says in the interview "The excesses of the past are getting purged out of the organization.", but you'd really have to be reading between the lines to see that as a reference to the Alamogordo landfill. It's still an interesting read, particularly given the benefit of hindsight. Also chanced across a resume for a man who worked at Atari in 1982-1983. Sent him an email asking if he can confirm or deny the landfill story, we'll see if he responds. I've stumbled across a few vague references to this not being the first time Atari destroyed carts to reduce inventory, but nobody sites sources. Anyone know anything about Atari destroying carts previous to the 1983 entombment? Found this article regarding some of Atari's wasteful behavior. I'm amazed at how widely the number of carts that were supposed to have been buried fluctuates. I've seen the number sited to be as small as 5000, and as high as 7 million. Nowhere have I seen the number of trucks reported to be higher than 14. I suppose that my calculation of the number of carts being 350,000 might be off by quite a bit, but I just can't see them being able to cram even as many as one million into fourteen truckloads. I'm ready to drive to New Mexico with a shovel just to put this thing to rest. -S

Not an actual Atari financial report, but I did find this info: http://www.icwhen.com/book/the_1980s/1983.shtml The decision to halt product development in September lines up pretty nicely with the date of the alleged Alamogordo dumping incident. -S

I found a site that claims to have extensive financial report archives, but one report costs $60. Still looking for a freebie. Even if I do manage to did this up I have a sinking feeling that it's going to be gibberish to me. -S

Uh huh... only I know about as much about investments & financial statements as my cat knows about astronomy. If you can give me a clue as to how to go about digging that kind of info up, I'll give it a go. -S

I'm definitely looing forward to learning more about this product. Sadly pretty much anything that announced in the way of breakthroughs near April 1 gets greeted with a lot of skepticism. -S

My wife has little to no interest in video games (she'll play the occasional classic on my MAME cab, but that's about it). However she has no problem with any of my strange hobbies. Video games, little British cars, scale modeling, I've even been known to build a siege weapon. She thinks the fact that I'm into kind of off the wall hobbies is neat. As to when I play games, well she has hobbies of her own. She's a musician so I'll usually play games while she's playing her guitar, piano, violin or mandolin. -S

I agree. I wish I knew how to go about finding information like that, but it's way out of my league. Took me long enough to find concrete pricing. -S

I think that I wish I had all those handhelds. -S

Nope. LOL -S

At $150 you just stole that sucker. Nice score. -S

I remember seeing Vaders on the shelves at Toys R Us up ntil the Juniors were introduced. -S