Spotlight: Alamogordo, New Mexico

It really is amazing what you can find on Google once you figure out what you want to look up. I want to tell you about a little town I just learned about. A place called Alamogordo, New Mexico.

In 1983, video game power house (at the time) Atari found itself in a tight spot. Having counted on huge sales of an arcade-to-console port of the epicly popular game Pac Man and a the first serious movie-licensed game (is there such a thing?), E.T., they manufactured millions of copies of both. Unfortunately, Pac Man, being far inferior to the arcade version people had come to love, failed to sell nearly as well as Atari brass had hoped, which was probably an overly-ambitious mark to begin with. E.T., which was rushed through development to meet the 1982 Christmas season and was hoped to sell purely on the popularity of the Spielberg movie, ended up as a game lauded by many to be the biggest embarrassment in the history of the gaming industry with horrible graphics (even by the standards of the day) and atrocious gameplay. The few copies that did sell were mostly returned by angry gamers who had been suckered in. The end result of all this was a warehouse filled to the brim with approximately 5 million unsold copies of Pac Man, nearly all of the 5 million unsold or returned copies of E.T, and an assortment of other similarly bad titles, half-baked protoypes, and other unsellable merchandise. This is stuff so bad Atari could not even give it away. They were left no choice. They had to bury it.

Loading up multiple trucks with the contents of their warehouse, Atari had their cache transported from their El Paso, TX office approximately 90 miles north to...you guessed it, Alamogordo, NM. Here the trucks dumped their loads into a secret landfill which was then covered over with cement; entombed forever in concrete. This legendary moment is largely considered to be the single most definitive event marking the end of the first era of video game entertainment. Shortly to follow would be the first great "video game crash," when many gamers turned to computers such as the Commodore 64 and Apple II for their electronic entertainment, which would in turn bring about the rise of such industry giants as Nintendo and Sega.

That in of itself makes this humble city worthy of note, but it doesn't end there. Most history books will tell you that the first American to travel in space is Alan Shepherd. But he wasn't. Another American beat him to it - an American named Ham, a chimpanzee. After his historic flight in 1961, he went on to live the rest of his life in a zoo in Washington, D.C. But upon his death in 1983, his body was transported to be entombed in the International Space Hall of Fame (also knwon as the New Mexico Museum of Space History) in Alamogordo.

It is also worth noting that the testing grounds at Alamogordo served as the site where Project Manhattan came to fruition in July of 1945, producing the first man-made nuclear explosion. Perhaps a darker moment than the other ones listed here, but a monumental piece of history nonetheless.

So who is up for a road trip?