Alamogordo Journal: Hunting for an E.T. Castoff in a Most Terrestrial Place

You load the cartridges into trucks and bury them in the New Mexico desert.

Atari did just that almost 30 years ago, or so the story goes. The truth lies beneath packed dirt and poured concrete in a sleeping landfill by the railroad tracks behind a McDonald’s here, where this city of about 32,000, home to an Air Force base and the state’s Museum of Space History, dumped its garbage many years ago.

A spray-painted sign, bright orange against a white background, warns visitors: “Keep Out.”

The place may be the final resting place for the video game E.T., recalled by some as one of the worst video games ever made.

Snopes.com, the Web authority on rumors, hoaxes and urban myths, ruled the burial of the E.T. cartridges a legend, though there are enough stories circulating online to cast doubt and feed the mystery. Here — in plastic cases, shoe boxes and tattered paper bags stored in closets and garages — there is enough proof to be found that at least some E.T. games were buried in the landfill.

“It’s not a myth,” Mark Esquero, 69, said in his living room one recent afternoon, brandishing a cartridge of E.T., one of more than a dozen games he scooped from a deep hole in the landfill the night after Atari dumped its loot.

The event has captured the imagination of the original joystick generation, to whom the video game experience was grounded on the enchanting possibilities of rudimentary graphic designs. (Think of characters built with Lego bricks; no curved lines.) It has inspired music videos and an independent film based on the Web television series “The Angry Video Game Nerd,” whose main character, traumatized by the E.T. game, sets out to debunk the legend of the landfill, hoping to save young generations of gamers from the trauma of playing it.

“Everybody’s always fantasized about digging up those games,” James Rolfe, the filmmaker and star of the series, said in an interview. “It’s the perfect nerdy treasure hunt.”

What could be there?

“Systems, prototypes,” said Joe Lewandowski, who ran a waste-management company in Alamogordo in the 1980s and seems to know a lot more about what happened than he is willing to tell. (Atari, which filed for bankruptcy this year, has been mum over the years, and further questions to Mr. Lewandowski were met with a mix of silence and mischievous smiles.)

Readers of a certain age might remember Geraldo Rivera’s quest to uncover the secrets of Al Capone’s vaults in 1986, a live television event that spectacularly revealed nothing besides empty bottles and debris. Last month, Fuel Entertainment, a digital company in Los Angeles, acquired an exclusive permit to excavate the Alamogordo landfill over the coming six months. It is probably safe to say there is going to be more than dust to find.

“We’re 100 percent going to be digging,” assured the company’s chief executive, Mike Burns, though he cautioned that “there might be nothing” in the hole or “there might be the holy grail of video games.”

There is no definitive account of that day in September 1983 when the trucks brought the Atari haul here, just versions that seem to feed on one another, changing slightly as they travel from one online forum to the next, as in a virtual game of telephone.

One story put the number of trucks at 20. Others say there were 10 or 14. Mr. Lewandowski recalled last week that 29 trucks had left Atari’s plant in El Paso, Tex., just over the border from New Mexico, and that 9 had made it to the landfill.

“The other 20,” he said, “no one knows what happened.”

There is a lingering rumor that one of the trucks was hijacked along the way and taken to Mexico, never to be seen again.

E.T., the video game, was made in five weeks so it could hit the market in time for the 1982 Christmas shopping season. Atari was banking on cashing in on the blockbuster movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” and paid Steven Spielberg, its director and co-producer, $20 million to $25 million for the rights to the film’s name.

Nick Montfort, an associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of “Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,” said, “It seems really impossible that anyone could have made a good game in that amount of time.”

The game was a huge flop. More than half the five million cartridges made were returned.

E.T. was not Atari’s only mistake. The company made more Pac-Man cartridges than there were consoles at the time, Professor Montfort said, “like making more records than there are record players.” Besides, it lost its hegemony once competitors began making cartridges that fit its system — some of them better than Atari’s, others cheaper but just not good.

“The market got oversaturated by stuff nobody wanted,” said Andrew Reiner, executive editor of Game Informer, a monthly magazine based in Minneapolis.

City officials here see the impending excavation of the landfill as an opportunity. One commissioner, Jason Baldwin, 39, said, “Any exposure is good exposure.” Another, Jim Talbert, 64, said, “I don’t understand what the fuss is all about, but we welcome it.”

Mayor Susie A. Galea, 32, said, “If you look at Roswell,” the city 120 miles to the east where a U.F.O. is rumored to have crash-landed in 1947, “it has a theme. Alamogordo doesn’t. We’re not sure what we want to be.”

Her hope, Ms. Galea went on, is that “the dig turns us into a destination, regardless of what it is that they find in there.”

Hunting for Syrian Hackers’ Chain of Command

The hacking group that calls itself the S.E.A. struck again on Friday, this time breaking into the Twitter accounts and blog headlines of The Financial Times. The attack was part of a crusade that has targeted dozens of media outlets as varied as The Associated Press and The Onion, the parody news site.

But just who is behind the S.E.A.’s cybervandalism remains a mystery. Paralleling the group’s boisterous, pro-Syrian government activity has been a much quieter Internet surveillance campaign aimed at revealing the identities, activities and whereabouts of the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Now sleuths are trying to figure out how much overlap there is between the rowdy pranks playing out on Twitter and the silent spying that also increasingly includes the monitoring of foreign aid workers. It’s a high-stakes search. If researchers prove the Assad regime is closely tied to the group, foreign governments may choose to respond because the attacks have real-world consequences. The S.E.A. nearly crashed the stock market, for example, by planting false tales of White House explosions in a recent hijacking of The A.P.’s Twitter feed.

The mystery is made more curious by the belief among researchers that the hackers currently parading as the S.E.A. are not the same people who started the pro-Assad campaign two years ago.

Experts say the Assad regime benefits from the ambiguity. “They have created extra space between themselves and international law and international opinion,” said James A. Lewis, a security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The S.E.A. emerged during the Syrian uprisings in May 2011, they said, to offer a pro-Assad counternarrative to news coming out of Syria. In speeches, Mr. Assad likened the S.E.A. to the government’s own online security corps, referring to the group as “a real army in a virtual reality.”

In its early incarnation, researchers said, the S.E.A. had a clearly defined hierarchy, with leaders, technical experts, a media arm and hundreds of volunteers. Several early members belonged to the Syrian Computer Society, a technical organization run by Mr. Assad before he became president. Until last month, digital records suggest, the Syrian Computer Society still ran much of the S.E.A.’s infrastructure. In April, a raid of S.E.A. Web domains revealed that the majority were still registered to the society.

S.E.A. members initially created pro-Assad Facebook pages and spammed popular pages like President Obama’s and Oprah Winfrey’s with pro-Syrian comments. But by the fall of 2011, S.E.A. activities had become more premeditated. They defaced prominent Web sites like Harvard University’s with pro-Assad messages, in an attack a spokesman characterized as sophisticated.

At some point, the S.E.A.’s crucial players disappeared and a second crop of hackers took over. The current group consists of roughly a dozen new actors led by hackers who call themselves “Th3 Pr0” and “The Shadow” and function more like Anonymous, the loose hacking collective, than a state-sponsored brigade. In interviews, people who now identify as the S.E.A. insist they operate independently from the Assad regime. But researchers who have been following the group’s digital trail aren’t convinced.

“The opportunity for collaboration between the S.E.A. and regime is clear, but what is missing is proof,” said Jacob West, a chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard. As governments consider stronger responses to malicious cyberactivity, Mr. West said, “the motivation for Syria to maintain plausible deniability is very, very real.”

Long before the S.E.A’s apparent changing of the guard, security researchers unearthed a stealthier surveillance campaign targeting Syrian dissidents that has since grown to include foreign aid workers. Morgan Marquis-Boire, a researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, uncovered spyware with names like “Dark Comet” and “BlackShades” sending information back to a Syrian state-owned telecommunications company. The software — which tracked a target’s location, read e-mails and logged keystrokes — disguised itself as an encryption service for Skype, a program used by many Syrian activists.

Mr. Marquis-Boire has uncovered more than 200 Internet Protocol addresses running the spyware. Some were among the few kept online last week during an Internet disruption in Syria that the government blamed on a “technical malfunction,” but experts described as a systematic government shutdown.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 17, 2013

An earlier version of this article based on previous reporting referred incorrectly to a representative of The Financial Times, Ryann Gastwirth. She is a spokeswoman, not a spokesman.