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Stingray

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Posts posted by Stingray

  1. Posted

     

    No-ones come forward and stated how much was supposedly written off the books for this or has come forward and said how much it would cost to bury a million carts.

     

    Well I'll take a stab at estimating it, although I fully admit that I'm doing quite a bit of guesswork.

     

    BFI officials had said their rationale was that

    Atari was paying them from $300-$500 a truck to

    dispose of the trash.

     

    Now after going back through the articles posted thus far, the largest number of truckloads I can find is 14. Taking that number and multiplying by $500 (the large end of the per-truckload estimate) you get $7000.

     

    Okay, that's what it cost to bury the carts. There's also a few days worth of labor invoved both in El Paso (loading the trucks) and at the Alamagordo end (unloading the trucks. I can't imagine that the labor cost more than the cost to have the carts buried so lets say another $7000 in labor.

     

    Next comes the cost to bury it in cement. Frankly this is the only part of the story that I have a hard time believing due to how much concrete work actually costs. I checked around and, at current prices, concrete is $65 - $70 a cubic yard as near as I can tell. I also learned that the average house has 60 cubic yards of concrete. So lets just randomly say that the equivilant of 10 houses worth of concrete was used. $70 times 60 cubic yards is $4200. $4200 times 10 is $42,000, yow! That's a lot of money to bury the garbage. I know my numbers are off because I'm going by current pricing. I'm not about to try and find out what concrete costs were like in 1983, but if anyone knows I'll be happy to change my estimate.

     

    So we're up to $56,000 for disposal costs. Let's throw in another $10,000 to cover variables that I'm not accounting for. That gives us $66,000 to fund E.T.'s funeral.

     

    Okay so what did Atari write off? Good question. I know the legend says it was a million cartridges. Lets see if we can come up with a better number. Looking online to try and find how big a semi truck trailer is yeilds varying results. Apparantly there are quite a few different sizes. Who knew? In any case I came up with anywhere from 2200 cubic feet to 3000 cubic feet. I'm going with 2500 because it's an easy number to work with.

     

    I don't have a cart box handy to measure so I'll just say you can get about ten of them in a cubic foot. Maybe more, maybe less, but we'll say ten. So 10 times 2500 is 25,000 carts per truck. 25,000 times 14 trucks is 350,000.

     

    So that begs the question of how much did Atari write off per cart? Nukey Shay says dollar-for-dollar. Does that mean full retail? I recall new Atari carts being in the $20-$25 range, we'll say they were $20. $20 times 350,000 carts is a cool seven million bucks. Hey even if they only wrote off half retail we're talking $3.5 million. Even going by what a boxed E.T. is worth today (what, about a dollar?) we're still looking at a $350,000 write off for a $66,000 expense.

     

    Okay, feel free to shred my argument, I know I'm doing a lot of guessing.

     

    -S

  2. Posted

    Well, so it looks like I won't be displaying anything after all. Oh well, I should have started looking for someone to share a table with sooner. My fault. Well maybe I'll meet someone at the show who's interested in sharing a table next year. In any case I look forward to attending.

     

    -S

  11. Posted

    So has anyone managed to contact the world famous M.E. McQuiddy yet? An interview with the reporter who actually wrote the stories would be great, even if it's a quick over the phone interview.

     

    I added Spud's latest two videos to the page. I also made a transcription of the interview for those who don't want to bother with downloading 40 MB for what amounts to a few paragraphs of text.

     

    There were a few places here and there where I just couldn't make out what the guy was saying. Spud, when you get a chance, read the interview and maybe you can fill in the blanks for me.

     

    You can read the transcript here.

  12. Posted

    Those aren't pictures, they're mpeg videos.  Spud,in the future can you please name the files with a ".mpg" at the end when you upload them?

     

    I'll do that, sorry, figured if I could see them everyone could.

     

    For what it's worth, all of the videos that I'm hosting on my site have now been given mpeg extensions. Should have everything posted up to this point there, unless anyone sees something that I missed.

     

    -S

  16. Posted

    Are you referring to the volcano/ cone buttons? They're usually pretty hard to come by, and are pretty expensive when you do find them. Someone was going to repro the cones at one point, but I don't know if anything ever came of that. A quick search of the BYOAC forum didn't turn anything up. Ebay would probably be your best bet to find them, but get your wallet ready. ;)

     

    -S

  17. Posted

    I saw it at Toys 'R' Us. You might want to check there. They have the best selection of any place around where I live!

     

    Thanks for the suggestion, but the toys r us nearest to me has a terrible selection, however it is next door to a great used game place so I may pop in and have a look next time I'm over there just for the heck of it.

     

    -S

  20. Posted

    Those aren't pictures, they're mpeg videos.  Spud,in the future can you please name the files with a ".mpg" at the end when you upload them?

     

    Are all of Spud's videos mpegs? I named the first two with .avi extensions (they open either way for me) but if they should have .mpg extensions I'll correct this on the page I've been puting together.

     

    -S

  21. Posted

    Spud's new pictures have been added to the great Atari landfill controversy page. Also for the benefit of those who don't have a fast enough connection to download them, I made an attempt to peice together a still image of the first one. The second one is a little too shaky for me to be able to do this.

     

    Landfill image

     

    Close up the front end loader showing what may or may not be a poster of a girl.

     

    -S

  23. Posted

    Or maybe once Spud has uploaded all the info he has, put it in one easy to access spot?

     

    Okay, I had a little time to kill this afternoon, so I went back through this thread and picked out the meaty bits. Here's my page on the great landfill contraversy.

     

    If I missed anything, let me know and I'll add it asap. I'll also try to keep up with the new stuff as it's posted. The page is set up to allow comments, anyone is welcome to leave one down at the bottom of the page.

     

    -S

  24. Posted

    Wow, some of you guys are really being jerks here. If you don't want to look at Atariboy2600's threads, then don't. There's no need to hurl insults.

     

    I commend you for taking the time to put these together, you might want to make them slightly narrower next time so you don't upset the "I don't wanna side scroll" crowd.

     

    -S

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