This week it has been announced by a Microsoft film crew, headed by Xbox's Major Nelson, that they had found the infamous landfill filled with unsold and unworthy Atari games buried within the El Paso desert.

Here's a thread with the information

The real question is, did they really find it? Could the games simply have been planted at the site?

Was this whole thing a ruse to gain attention towards the film, or a real discovery made by the good people at Microsoft's new entertainment company?

As I've said exactly before, how on earth could a documentary crew found it so easily, yet people were searching the area for years and found nothing. How are we to know the games weren't just planted for the sake of a good story? Plastic melts and warps in heat, yet the shrink wrap was still in tact, and the games were untouched, even though they had been in the (famously) severe weather of the desert for 30 years. How is this possible?

What are your thoughts on this?

I have heard that those games and stuff might not be from the great E.T. burial. They could be from a company of Atari's that closed around the end of 2600. They had over stock there and had to get rid of it. 

I can the them looking the way they do though after 30 years. That is my recycling is good and landfills are bad. If a card board box can last 30 years how long is the other stuff lasting?

Keeping the cartridges under the ground would likely keep them preserved, even if the desert is hot during the day, but they were not all perfectly intact. Some of the packaging and cartridges were damaged, as you would expect of something that would be under mountains of dirt for a very long time.

I also thought that it took them two weeks to find any bit of information regarding the E.T. cartridges, or the cartridges themselves, so I do not know if you would consider that easy.

They are also doing a full-blown excavation of the area, and have tons of funding to continue searching. Having a lot of funding would obviously also make the excavation work easier, seeing as they do not have to worry about costs for machinery, water, food, etc. 

Personally, I doubt that this is a conspiracy, and I do not really see why they would need to give any extra attention to the film, seeing as it was already extremely popular. 

The games were buried under a sheet of concrete, that's why they were guarded from the elements and in such a well-preserved state.

Also, people haven't been searching the area for years because people were not allowed to search the area. Xbox Entertainment Studios had to get permits just to do some digging. Joe Schmo Jr. with his pappy's shovel wouldn't be allowed inside to look around.

I guess there's no way to really confirm it unless you were there (and oh do I wish I was...)