A
lamogordo, New Mexico -- The dusty town of Alamogordo seems more like a relic of the highway culture of the 1950s and '60s than it does a future player in the world of video gaming. Currently known by few outside of the town and airmen who passed through a term at nearby Holloman Air Force Base, most of what would be considered "downtown" is nothing more than gas stations, hotels, and fast food. It's as though the town accepted its fate as a pass-through rather than a destination and grew-up accordingly. Even in the gilded age, when railroads ruled the vast expanses of America's west, steam engines passed right by Alamogordo (the local water is very hard, and reacted corrosively with the tanks on the great bellowing machines). In spite of the rugged beauty of the surrounding southwestern wilderness, including White Sands National Monument, Alamogordo would probably be largely ignored and its place in time and relevance set in stone. But a certain consumer electronics company has decided to give Alamogordo its own footnote in the history of video games (should such a book ever be written). The Atari corporation, makers of the hugely successful video game adaptation of Stephen Spielberg's film "E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial," have decided that the sleepy town an hour north of El Paso will be home to a grand new distribution and shipping center for their games and consoles.
In July of last year, when Howard Scott Warshaw was asked by his superiors to develop an E.T. game before Christmas, he told them flat-out "no way."