Robert Smith

They're way worse than expected.

The stock crashes.

And as we go into 83 now, it's not just Atari.

The whole video game industry collapses.

There is this incredible glut of consoles.

All these different companies are selling consoles of games.

There's a lot of really bad games.

There's, like, third-party companies are selling games.

Apparently, Chuckwagon Dogfood...

There's like a chuckwagon dog food video game.

And on top of all that now, you have home computers, real computers like we would think of as computers with keyboards.

You know, there's the Commodore 64 is coming out at this time.

At my house, we had the lesser known Texas Instruments TI-99-4A, which I remember for its cassette deck instead of a disk drive.

So Atari is now losing hundreds of millions of dollars

Kazar, the CEO, he gets accused by the SEC of insider trading, of selling shares just before that bad earnings announcement at the end of 82.

He leaves the company in the summer, says he didn't do anything wrong, but he's out.

Werner replaces him with a marketing guy from Philip Morris, a guy who helped come up with the Marlboro Man.

And a few months later, in the second half of 83, Atari actually has so much unsold merchandise, so many video games that nobody wants to buy, that they actually go and supposedly dump hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges in a landfill, in a pit, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and cover it up.

It's heartbreaking.

And is it even true?