Bill Houlehan has buried more than a million 20-year-old Atari game cartridges deep underground. No, they're not in a landfill - he has them stacked in a warehouse carved from an old limestone mine, and his company is gradually selling off the buried treasures to die-hard Atari fans around the world.
The Atari mother lode is all brand new, in original packaging complete with manuals, even though the games came off an assembly line in the 1980s and regular retailers haven't stocked them in years.
"People cannot believe that there are still unopened Atari Classic games available," Mr. Houlehan said.
"People hear about us from newsgroups, magazine articles, word of mouth, all kinds of sources," he added. "I can't believe it sometimes, the interest comes from all over the world."
His company, O'Shea Ltd. of Kansas City, Mo., bought 2.3 million game cartridges for the Atari 2600 and 7800 game consoles when the manufacturer liquidated its unsold stock in the early 1990s. Since then, it has gradually sold off slightly more than half of the inventory on its Web site at www.atariclassic.com.
What made him want to buy 2.3-million obsolete video cartridges in the first place?
"I had a market for them at the time because some retailers were still selling them, and while I knew there was a risk that could dry up, I figured there are so many consoles out there and these games are classics," Mr. Houlehan said. "I think there will probably always be a market for them."
Even though the Atari consoles were discontinued years ago, there's an astonishing number of working machines still out there. Atari claims to have sold more than 35 million 2600 and 7800 systems in the U.S. alone, also marketing the consoles as the Sears Video Game System.
"Atari made the first really good video games for the home," Mr. Houlehan said. "Millions of people bought consoles and lots of them just never threw these things away, so they're still out there and now people are rediscovering the old games."
Although O'Shea doesn't sell the Atari consoles, they're still a common sight at yard sales and flea markets. There are even some retail sources for used machines.
"At the moment, I can put people in touch with six or seven companies that are still selling these consoles. You can find them easily on auction sites like eBay, too," Mr. Houlehan said.
The games are priced at $2 (U.S.) with a minimum order of a dozen, plus shipping charges to Canada via UPS. O'Shea could probably command a higher price, considering these classic games are nearly antiques and yet are still pristine in their original shrinkwrap, but Mr. Houlehan said he set the price low on purpose. "I think $2 is fair to all. People get a good price for a game and I can move more volume that way, which is good for me, too."
The collection of 46 titles ranges from such classics as Centipede, Asteroids, Dig Dug, Galaxian, Donkey Kong and Pole Position, to lesser know games like Barnyard Blaster, Ninja Golf and Super Football.
The warehouse near Kansas City that contains the gamer's treasure trove is 150-feet underground in a limestone mine that was converted to commercial storage space. O'Shea's portion of the warehouse measures 20,000 square feet, a space nearly the size of a football field with ceilings high enough to take a tractor trailer. It's an ideal long-term home for the games, because the humidity is low and the temperature is a constant 20-degrees Celcius.
O'Shea's warehouse doesn't just house old games. Mr. Houlehan is a wheeler-dealer, buying up excess inventory wherever he smells a bargain. Besides the cartridges and 20 different kinds of Atari shirts (ranging from the company's distinctive three - track logo to scenes from games like Asteroids and PacMan), the warehouse contains a bizarre collection of goods, all for sale on the Web site. The stock ranges from crate upon crate of electric toothbrushes and Beanie Bears wearing John Elway and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar jerseys, to millions of red plastic Tupperware pizza cutters and 125,000 battery-operated Mr. Potato Head foot massagers.
The Web site is even selling 20,000 pounds of unprocessed gold ore from South America. "I was negotiating with a bonded warehouse for an order of 70,000 tennis shoes when I heard that they had this gold ore, and I decided I'd take that too," Mr. Houlehan said.
O'Shea is a small family company, and when they have time, Mr. Houlehan's six children pitch in to help pack orders - although he said they are usually more interested in playing the games than packing them up (several consoles are set up permanently in the warehouse).
O'Shea Ltd. sells about 10,000 games a month on its Web site. Mr. Houlehan said the top-selling titles are Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug and Pole Position, but most people buy a couple of copies of every game he has in inventory.
"I sell across North America, to the U.K., Sweden, Germany, France, Brazil and so on - there are Atari fans everywhere," Mr. Houlehan said.
But not everyone wants to play the games they buy. O'Shea recently sold 5,000 cartridges to a U.S. company which, in a sacrilegious move that would shock the Atari faithful, ripped out the circuit board in each cartridge and replaced it with an invitation to a "retro 80s" theme party.
Mr. Houlehan hesitates to say how long he thinks the remaining supply of about 1.1-million cartridges will last, but said a few titles have already sold out. He estimates he probably has several years worth of games left at the current pace of sales, but adds that a few big orders like the retro-party or somebody tying old Atari memorabilia into a promotional campaign could clean him out sooner than expected. He says he's been approached with ideas like this by people eyeing the rest of his Atari stock, but so far hasn't closed a deal.
"In this business, you just never know what's going to happen [to your inventory]from one day to the next."
Mr. Houlehan is not overly sentimental about the games and he'll sell to whoever wants them, no matter what they want them for. But he confides that he does have a soft spot for a few personal favourites - Battlezone, Pole Position and Basketball - and from time to time visitors might catch him or his staff doing some "quality control" work to make sure the games are still as much fun as they remember
"The detail of these games is incredible, considering when they were made. In Basketball, when a player breaks the backboard, somebody actually comes out and sweeps it up," Mr. Houlehan laughs.
He added that he won't let the last of the games go when the inventory runs out. "When we come down to the end, I'll probably keep a master carton of each game for myself."