Fourteen truckloads. That’s how much material Atari trucked out to a landfill near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in September 1983 and buried under a layer of concrete, according to the fact-checking site Snopes, which spent years running down exactly what got dumped there and why.

Somewhere in that concrete-capped pile were unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a video game so infamous it’s still shorthand for corporate disaster four decades later. One surviving piece of it now lives in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

The game’s failure wasn’t really the programmer’s fault, or at least not entirely. Atari handed developer Howard Scott Warshaw roughly five and a half weeks to build a game around a movie license that had cost a fortune to secure, an absurd deadline even by early-80s standards.

To recoup what it had spent, Atari needed to move about four million cartridges. It manufactured close to that many. It sold, per the Smithsonian’s own account of the story, just over one million — and a wave of returns from disappointed buyers made the shortfall even worse.

What happened next is where the story curdles into legend. Warehouses in El Paso were sitting on pallets of unmoved stock, and rather than eat the storage costs indefinitely, Atari trucked a portion of it across state lines to the Alamogordo landfill and had it buried and paved over. Local papers covered it at the time. Then, as the story got retold over the following thirty years, “some surplus inventory” quietly inflated into an urban legend about millions of E.T. cartridges specifically, single-handedly bulldozed into the desert — a myth so durable it eventually needed its own fact-check.

The truth turned out to be stranger than the legend in a different way: it was real, just smaller and messier than the story that grew up around it. In April 2014, the production company Fuel Entertainment got permission to excavate the site for a documentary, essentially digging to find out whether thirty years of rumor had any basis at all. It did. Diggers pulled hundreds of intact and semi-intact cartridges out of the dirt, E.T. among them, along with other Atari titles and hardware that had been dumped in the same load.

Word of the dig reached Drew Robarge, a museum specialist at the National Museum of American History, who contacted Fuel Entertainment and asked whether the museum could have a piece of what came out of the ground. The company agreed. A single cartridge, now catalogued as accession number 2014.0190 with a paper certificate from the City of Alamogordo verifying its origin, entered the Smithsonian’s permanent collection as a gift — not as a joke artifact, but as a genuine record of what the museum’s own materials describe as one of the events that fed into the North American video game crash of 1982 to 1985, the collapse that nearly killed the industry before Nintendo rebuilt it from Japan outward.

Most of what came out of the landfill didn’t go to a museum. The City of Alamogordo, which owned the dig rights, sold 881 of the recovered cartridges through its own eBay account in 2015, and buyers paid a combined $107,930 for pieces of dirt-stained plastic that, two years earlier, had been buried treasure only in the ironic sense. One E.T. cartridge alone brought $1,535. The city kept roughly 300 more out of the sale entirely, judging them too historically significant to part with.

The museum has been careful about what story it’s actually telling with the piece. As a specialist there put it to CBS News when the donation was announced, the collection had a gap around “the dark days” of the 1980s, when the industry’s first boom curdled into a bust nobody in Silicon Valley likes to dwell on. A single scuffed cartridge, dug out of a landfill three decades after it was buried, filled that gap better than a polished, mint-condition copy ever could have. The dirt is the point.

That’s the trick this particular object pulls off. E.T. isn’t in the Smithsonian because it’s good — nobody involved in the story, then or now, argues that it is. It’s there because failure at that scale, documented that specifically, is its own kind of historical evidence. The cartridge sitting in a climate-controlled drawer in Washington isn’t a punchline anymore. It’s the physical proof that an entire industry can overreach, collapse, and get buried, and that thirty years later, someone will still dig it back up to see if the story was true.