Burying E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Undoing Game Archaeology

Paolo Ruffino's conference paper uses the April 2014 excavation of Atari's buried E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial cartridges in Alamogordo, New Mexico, as a case study in how video game history is written. Microsoft and Fuel Industries secured excavation rights as part of a documentary project, and Microsoft's Larry Hryb announced the discovery on 26 April 2014. The paper argues that the dig exemplifies a common historiographic habit in game studies: seeking proof for a story already told and repeated in histories of the medium, so that present knowledge about Atari becomes the destination of the research rather than something open to question.

The theoretical contribution is a reinterpretation of archaeology through Michel Foucault, moving from his "archaeology of knowledge" toward the genealogical method. Genealogy, as Ruffino reads it, does not hunt for origins that restore an apparent unity. It examines the present conditions under which truths about the past can be spoken, and it challenges the notion of the present rather than projecting present questions onto the past. This framing is set against the way archaeology has been understood in game studies and media archaeology, notably by Raiford Guins, Erkki Huhtamo, and Huhtamo and Parikka.

Ruffino reads the E.T. narratives as reinforcing existing categories and treating contemporary discourses as given unities. He counters this by examining how those unities destabilize. Shortly after the find, online rumors suggested it had been staged to complete the documentary, and new conspiracy theories emerged. Online communities began asking why these stories were being told at all, which turned the present into an unstable vantage point and gave the E.T. urban legend new life.

The paper also takes seriously, as a non-rhetorical question, Kyle Orland's query in Ars Technica about why people care so much about buried plastic and silicon. It uses that question to interrogate why game history is so often written as the history of an industry and its successful or failed products. The work is a short theoretical abstract rather than an empirical study, centered on one US-based event in 2014 and the early-1980s industry crisis, and keyed to media archaeology, game history, and the performativity of language.