Why did Atari fail?
In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games. In 1983, rumors circulated: Atari was bankrupt, and was dumping truckloads of games into a New Mexico landfill. Victim to the Video Game Crash, the company buried 700,000 cartridges in the desert. The story became an obscure pop culture legend — until The Atari Tomb was unearthed in 2014.