What Museums Do: Versions
The certificate, in other words, answers the wrong question — but it isn’t alone in that. Every museum holding these materials has to decide what question it’s trying to answer, and that’s where Latour and Lowe become most useful.
They build toward this argument through a more elaborate example: Veronese’s Nozze di Cana, the original of which hangs in the Louvre, displaced from the Venetian refectory for which it was painted by Napoleon’s armies in 1797. When Factum Arte produced a high-resolution facsimile and returned it to Palladio’s refectory on the island of San Giorgio in Venice, something unexpected happened: the copy, restored to its original context — correct lighting, height, architectural relationship — felt more faithful to the painting’s meaning than the original in Paris. The aura, Latour and Lowe argue, had migrated. Their point is not that copies are as good as originals, but that “originality” is not a fixed property of a single object — it is distributed across the whole trajectory of a work’s life, and it can accumulate in unexpected places.
The most clarifying moment in their essay, however, is a more modest analogy: the performance of King Lear. No one walks into a production and asks whether this is the real King Lear, faithfully reproducing some ur-performance that Shakespeare himself staged and that all subsequent versions must answer to. No one asks if this is the original. What audiences ask is whether it is well or badly performed. Each production is a segment in a long trajectory, judged on its own terms as a version, not measured against an inaccessible original. And crucially, a genuinely great production can add something to the work — finding dimensions in it that earlier versions left dormant — making the original richer rather than merely reproducing it.
This is the situation I find myself in, moving from museum to museum. The Alamogordo event is not available in any original form — there is no first performance to which every museum staging must answer, no single excavation any visitor could have witnessed in full. What there were instead, even at the moment of the dig itself, were a rumor stretching back decades, a documentary crew shaping what was filmed, an archaeological team working under time and sandstorm, and a crowd of hundreds each experiencing a different slice of the same Saturday. What is available now are stagings: each institution’s specific choices about what to foreground, what to leave out, what objects to gather, what narratives to build around them. The question I find myself asking in each gallery is not whether the cartridges are authentic (the certificates say they are) but whether this staging does justice to the complexity of what happened. Is it well or badly staged?
Latour and Lowe offer a second way to navigate the same conundrum, one I introduced earlier: the trajectory. Recall, instead of asking whether any given object is an original or a copy, they propose attending to the whole trajectory — the river and all its tributaries. The same logic applies to the Alamogordo event: it is not a fixed thing that museums either faithfully stage or distort. It is an ongoing accumulation of everything that has fed into and followed from the rumor, the excavation, and their long institutional afterlife. Each staging draws on a particular point in that river and works with what it can carry. The question is what it does with what it has.
There is one further dimension the Shakespeare analogy captures that the Veronese argument does not: the Alamogordo excavation was always partly theatrical. The crowd in the desert, the documentary crew, archaeology as spectacle, a digger excavating a thirty-five-foot pit for an audience of hundreds — it was already a performance before any museum staged it. The museums are, in this sense, reviving something that was conceived for an audience from the start. What they are arguing about, whether they know it or not, is how to direct the second act.
Göteborg. “A World of Games” at Världskulturmuseet ran from April 2023 through May 2026 and brought together more than 100 games spanning 4,000 years, from an ancient Egyptian game board called Men through Japanese karuta, Indian Ganjifa cards, chess pieces from China, role-playing games, LARP, arcade machines, and e-sports. The Atari burial sits inside all of that. The Alamogordo cartridges — dirty, cracked, excavated from a New Mexico landfill — share an exhibition with objects that predate them by millennia, from cultures that never heard of Atari and had no stake in the 1983 crash. The juxtaposition is quietly extraordinary: the burial that I once cynically questioned whether anyone should care about appears here as a chapter in the deep history of human play, alongside game boards from ancient Egypt whose rules have been entirely forgotten. Whatever the burial is, Världskulturmuseet has decided it belongs in that company. I stood there longer than the placard warranted.
My photographs appear in the display, credited. Reinhard appears on video. The version Göteborg produces is intellectually ambitious. It reaches not for game industry history but for something closer to anthropology, a long view of play that makes the Atari crash look less like a business story and more like one more episode in the very long history of games appearing, circulating, and disappearing. What it occasionally risks is absorbing the specificity of the event into a frame so broad that the strangeness of the burial itself — the legend, the confirmation, the crowd in the desert — can recede behind the larger argument. That risk seems worth taking. Few institutions have placed the Alamogordo materials in a context that reframes them so thoroughly — here they are not industry artifacts or collector’s items but participants in a conversation about human play that began long before electronics existed.
There is also something the Göteborg display cannot fully account for: the fact that I am standing in it. Latour and Lowe write about the “migration of the aura” — the way auratic presence can detach from one version of a work and reattach to another. Something like this happens when a researcher’s documentary images migrate from the conditions of their making into institutional life. The photographs were made as records on a tempestuous April day in New Mexico. They now function as evidence, as atmosphere, as wall panels in an exhibition about 4,000 years of games. They are doing work I did not assign them, in a context I could not have anticipated.
Rome. GAMM has assembled a particularly expansive and inventive staging of the Alamogordo event. The display cases alone contain multitudes: recovered cartridges (Warlords, Star Raiders, Missile Command, Asteroids) in various states of degradation; trays of actual Alamogordo soil with cartridge fragments still embedded in it; two City of Alamogordo Certificates of Authenticity mounted at the top of the cases like institutional crowns; and the September 1983 newspaper article “Dump here utilized,” by M.E. McQuiddy in the Alamogordo Daily News — the contemporaneous documentation of the burial, published before it had passed into game history.
My photographs appear on screens that walk visitors through details of the excavation; others, from the original 1983 dump — the empty desert site, the machinery at work, workers pouring concrete to prevent theft — are placed throughout the display cases. Reinhard appears on a large overhead screen in a video produced specifically for the museum, identified as being from the Game Museum of Rome Archive.
What stopped me entirely were the coin-op cabinets. GAMM has produced three custom arcade machines, branded “E.T. The Fall,” running playable versions of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Pac-Man, and Q*bert on Atari 2600 hardware. The cabinet artwork merges the excavation aesthetic with classic arcade design: sandy desert tones, distressed lettering, the look of something dug up and repurposed. Visitors can play E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial — the game whose burial they have just been reading about — on a cabinet that commemorates its interment. Who wouldn’t want to play the very game whose failure they’re reading about? The game is simultaneously the object of study and the thing you play, the artifact and the experience. GAMM understood that the burial was not just a story about objects but about games, and that the most direct way to display a game is to let people play it.
The sheer volume of material GAMM has gathered, and the inventiveness with which it has been deployed, produces a staging of Alamogordo that is dense and strange. In the terms Latour and Lowe borrow from Shakespeare: it is a production that throws everything at the play, and the play holds up.
Cambridge. The Cambridge Computer Centre places the Alamogordo materials within a “Gaming Zone” that frames video games in the context of British computing history and general game history — the E.T. panel sits adjacent to one on Colossal Cave as a precursor to interactive fiction, situating the burial within a longer history of what computers have made possible. The interpretive panel is headed “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial / The Worst Video Game of All Time?” and works through the film, Howard Scott Warshaw’s six-week development deadline, the crash, and the burial, concluding that the 728,000 games buried at Alamogordo marked “the symbolic end of Atari as a video game industry giant.” It also makes space for Warshaw himself, quoting him directly: “It’s awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex.” Even the man blamed for ending an industry gets a punchline.
The panel’s built-in touchscreen offers a menu of remarkable range: the E.T. film trailer, the Atari: Game Over documentary trailer, KOB Albuquerque News coverage of the excavation, a dedicated excavation video — and the option to play E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial itself. The regional New Mexico television footage is the detail that arrests me: the most local and least mediated documentation of the event, made available alongside the Microsoft-produced documentary in the same interface. At Cambridge, the burial is visible simultaneously as regional news story, corporate media event, and playable game — and the designer held responsible for it gets to complicate his own reputation in his own words. Cambridge doesn’t resolve the event into a single argument. It puts its diverse components in the same touchscreen menu and lets the visitor sort them out. I spent longer at that touchscreen than I’d like to admit.
Sheffield. The National Video Game Museum holds its Alamogordo materials within a display case that places E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the company of Football Manager, Fantasy Games, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Batman — a survey of gaming history in which the burial appears as one chapter among many rather than a singular event deserving its own shrine. The label reads simply “The E.T. Incident” and gives the essential facts in a few sentences: Warshaw’s absurdly short development deadline, the poor sales, the fourteen trucks dumped at Alamogordo. It is an economical treatment of the event, and in that economy there is a kind of confidence — this is game history, it belongs here, it does not require special pleading.
The cartridge and manual on display are not excavated materials. There is no Certificate of Authenticity, no Alamogordo dirt, no deformed game cartridge. Sheffield represents the burial through a standard retail copy of the game. This is a curatorial decision that turns out to matter considerably, because of what else is in the case. The E.T. manual is inscribed by Howard Scott Warshaw himself — “For Game City & Notgames / The National Videogame Arcade” — with his signature. Sheffield holds a copy of the game signed by its maker, donated directly to the museum. The Certificate of Authenticity authenticated the cartridges’ passage through the earth’s crust. Warshaw’s inscription authenticates something different: the game’s passage through his hands, his own recognition that what he produced belongs in a collection. It is a different segment of the trajectory entirely — not the burial but the making, the designer’s acknowledgment of the museum as a worthy custodian. The dirt on the excavated cartridges speaks to what happened in 1983. Warshaw’s signature speaks to what the game has become since.
Málaga. The OXO Museum has made an architecturally distinctive display decision: a freestanding column in which the Alamogordo materials are stacked vertically, ascending in order of institutional weight. At the base, a bilingual panel on the 1983 crash. Above it, a playable screen running E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Above that, a glass vitrine with purple underlighting containing an excavated Vanguard cartridge — degraded, still bearing its red label, the dirt of New Mexico implicit in its condition. And at the very top, presiding over everything below it, the City of Alamogordo Certificate of Authenticity, framed and elevated like a reliquary card. I didn’t expect to genuflect at a museum display in Málaga, but here we are. The physical hierarchy says something the other institutions leave implicit: the certificate is not supplementary documentation, it is the crown of the display.
The certificate itself rewards close attention. It authenticates a Vanguard cartridge, not E.T. — a reminder that the burial encompassed far more than E.T., whatever popular memory had reduced it to. It bears three signatures: Mayor Susie Galea of Alamogordo, Joseph R. Lewandowski as Researcher/Organizer, and Howard Scott Warshaw, signed as Atari Game Engineer. Warshaw co-authenticating the recovered objects is something I keep turning over. The designer whose game became the symbol of the crash, signing certificates that verify the objects of that crash, for museums around the world. His signature on the Sheffield manual speaks to the game’s making. His signature on the Málaga certificate speaks to its burial and recovery. The same hand, two entirely different segments of the trajectory.
The bilingual panel is also worth noting for how it frames the crash within global game history: the American collapse of 1983, it explains, coincided with a “change of scenery” in which the video game revolution continued in Europe through 8-bit microcomputers and in Japan through consoles like the Famicom. The burial was an American ending that was also a global beginning. Málaga, a Spanish museum, makes that point explicitly — and says so on the wall.
Shanghai. The Video Game Museum of CADPA stages a translation of its own, across an ocean and into a country that had no direct stake in the 1983 crash whatsoever. A panel headed “The Great Atari Crash” narrates the collapse in economic terms: the American home video game market peaked at $3.2 billion in 1983 and fell to approximately $100 million by 1985, the causes being overproduction, market saturation, and Atari’s loss of control over third-party developers. Illustrating the panel is one of my photographs: cartridges in the Alamogordo dirt, a Centipede box clearly visible among the debris — used without credit, which I mention only in passing and without grievance; photographs travel, and this one has clearly traveled well. What strikes me more is what the panel’s existence means. China did not experience the 1983 crash. The Atari 2600 was not a presence in Chinese homes. The burial in New Mexico is not part of any living memory here. And yet CADPA, whose ambitions include participation in the global conversation on video game museums, treats the Alamogordo materials as significant enough to document. The burial has become a chapter in world game history, not just US game history. I think of my wife’s response — museums are telling you that the stuff is important — and find it confirmed in the last place I might have expected. My cynicism, it turns out, was parochial.
What the Versions Leave Out
Across these institutions, the question that Latour and Lowe arm me against keeps reasserting itself: is this the real thing? The Certificate of Authenticity raises it. The presence of the documentary raises it. The fact that millions of identical cartridges exist raises it. Visitors arrive with it already formed.
The question the objects actually reward is different, however. It is the question of what each staging of Alamogordo, each museum’s specific choices about framing, selection, supplementation, and context, does with the complexity of the event. The cartridges are segments in a trajectory that includes a thirty-year rumor, a series of critical articles, an archaeological excavation organized by a film company, a municipal certificate of authenticity, a commercial marketplace, a hard hat in the Henry Ford, and cultural responses the museums have yet to reckon with: a bootleg toy maker – Special Ed Toys – whose “$999,999.99 or best offer” packaging does sharper critical work on the eBay situation than anything the City of Alamogordo produced, and a French artist, Florent Deloison, who in 2023 made an actual Atari 2600 game in which the player buries E.T. cartridges in the New Mexico desert — the machine burying itself, running on the hardware whose failure prompted the burial. Neither appears in any museum display I have visited. The trajectory keeps moving. The display cases do not.
What I find most instructive, looking across these institutions, is that the stagings sitting least comfortably with me are not the ones that do the least. They are the ones that claim the most while omitting what is genuinely strange about the event. The Alamogordo excavation was not a simple archaeological recovery. It was a media event organized by a corporation, created by a documentary crew, negotiated through municipal government, certified by bureaucratic apparatus, monetized through eBay, and distributed to institutions through a commercial marketplace that museums had to enter as bidders. That is a complicated trajectory. The stagings that acknowledge the complication — that let the strangeness show — seem to me the better ones in Latour and Lowe’s sense: more fecund, more generative, more faithful to what happened.
A Note on Returning
I want to return to the likes of GAMM and OXO, because I have not finished with what I experienced there. Latour and Lowe describe a visitor who enters the Salle de la Joconde and experiences a “terrible cognitive dissonance” on encountering the Veronese in a context entirely wrong for it — wrong lighting, height, relationship to the architectural space for which it was made. The version she saw in Venice, the facsimile in Palladio’s refectory, had been more faithful to the original’s meaning than the original in Paris. The aura had migrated.
I do not want to over claim something similar for my own experience in Göteborg or GAMM. But there is a version of the Alamogordo story that lives in the photographs in those museums — in the specific choices I made about angle and proximity and moment, made by someone who had been writing about this event for a decade before it happened, who came on his own dime, who was there as a historian rather than as a spectator — that is not fully available anywhere else. Not in the documentary, not in the text panels that accompany the cartridges in any of these museums. To find those photographs credited with my name, doing work I did not assign them, is to encounter a version of myself as a segment in a trajectory I am still in the middle of.
I want to keep going back to these places. What I know from the accumulation of these visits is that no single institution has figured out what to do with objects that are simultaneously archaeological, industrial, cultural-historical, legendary, commercially distributed, satirized, and artistically reanimated. Each one has solved part of the problem and deferred the rest. Latour and Lowe note that the Veronese facsimile in Venice paradoxically triggered plans for a new restoration of the original refectory — “a facsimile of a heavily restored original, now in a new location, was causing new elements to be added to an original in its original location that is in part a facsimile of itself. Originality once seemed so simple.” The Alamogordo situation is less elegant but no less recursive: each segment of the trajectory kept generating the next, the rumor begetting the excavation, the excavation begetting its own afterlife, on and on, with no sign of arriving anywhere final. The trajectory is still open. The questions the objects raise do not resolve. I still owe that camera an apology, and I am still working out what I saw — neither debt seems close to settled.
