Jun 05, 2013 12:35 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A Canadian film company has received permission to explore and exhume old video games in the state's famous Atari landfill, the Alamogordo Daily News reported.

The city commission in Alamogordo, N.M. granted Fuel Industries permission to dig through the landfill and videotape their search for the legendarily bad "E.T" video games of the 80's. The project is for a documentary the film company hopes to produce.

Alamogordo approves Atari excavation

The landfill is a local urban legend, but Fuel Industries believes it to be true and so does New Mexico garbage disposal veteran Joe Lewandowski.

He said thousands of copies of Atari's "E.T: Extraterrestrial" game are buried in a landfill in the western side of the city. He also said some do not believe it exists.

"It was the game systems, actually the game systems themselves it was actual cartridges and games, ET and so on," Lewandowski, who claims to know the spot of the games buried in the 100-acre landfill, told KRQE in May.

Lewandowski said there are many stories surrounding the returned and unsold games. According to the sanitation worker, legend says thieves supposedly stole a truck carrying a load of the games and dumped them in New Mexico, copies of the game were run over by a bulldozer and twenty or so truckloads, like the one that may have been stolen, are rumored to still exist.

The game the film crew is searching for had one fatal glitch that infuriated gamers and gave it its "terrible" label. E.T continually falls into a hole, so players cannot get past the beginning of the game. Millions of copies of the game were bought and most were returned, but many remaining copies that went unsold are said to be buried in Alamogordo.

The Canadian film crew has six months to excavate the site, according to their contract with the city. As the dig has just been approved, no release date has been set for the film, but the city's mayor, Susie Galea, hopes for some attention for Alamogordo.

"I hope more people find out about Alamogordo through this opportunity that we have to unearth the Atari games in the landfill," she said.

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