We might think that a trend is clear and certain, but the future is not inevitable
Nestled in the cradle of New Mexico's rugged Tularosa Basin, Alamogordo emerges as an oasis of charm and natural wonder.
The town's streets, adorned with adobe and Southwestern-inspired architecture, blend seamlessly into the desert landscape.
Pueblo-style buildings, with their terracotta hues and rounded edges, pay homage to the heritage of the region. Stucco walls, adorned with vibrant turquoise accents, seem to capture the spirit of the nearby White Sands National Park.
The town embraces its role as a gateway to adventure, inviting hikers and thrill-seekers to ascend the heights of the Sacramento Mountains. Here, pine-scented forests provide a stark contrast to the arid plains below.
You probably never visited Alamogordo, and you never thought of it as a destination to pay attention to.
An historical destination, I dare to say.
Indeed, Alamogordo has two noteworthy events associated with it.
Neither is particularly flattering.
Firstly, Alamogordo was the site of the 1945 Trinity test, the first successful test of an atomic bomb. This event was a pivotal moment in history as it marked the beginning of the atomic age and the development of nuclear weapons.
The test was part of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret U.S. government program to develop atomic weapons. Its primary purpose was to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of an implosion-type atomic bomb. The bomb used for the Trinity test was codenamed Gadget: it employed a plutonium core and utilized conventional explosives to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.
On July 16th, at 5:29 a.m. local time, the Gadget was detonated from a 100-foot steel tower. The explosion released an enormous amount of energy, creating a blinding flash of light, a mushroom cloud, and a powerful shockwave.
The Trinity test proved that nuclear fission could be controlled and harnessed for destructive purposes. This successful test led to the subsequent use of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, hastening the end of World War II.
Secondly, in 1983 - 38 years after the Trinity test - Alamogordo became the burial ground for some other stuff. Far less dangerous and destructive, yet still puzzling: hundreds of thousands of unsold videogame cartridges.
The videogame cartridges saga
Yes, you read that correctly, videogame cartridges.
To understand this story, we need to look at Atari, the American company that was a leader in the videogame and console industry at the time.
Atari brought famous arcade titles like Asteroids and Space Invaders into millions of American homes in the 1970s.
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In 1982, Atari seemed poised for success with favorable financial reports and competitors lagging behind. However, their overconfidence led to a series of poor decisions.
The first mistake was associated with the launch of PacMan. Atari decided to produce 12 million copies of the game, more than the number of consoles capable of playing it (limited to 10 million). They hoped PacMan's popularity would drive sales of the new Atari-2600 consoles. While PacMan sold well, five million unsold cartridges piled up in warehouses and stores.
The second blunder involved ET - The Extraterrestrial, Spielberg's blockbuster film that shattered box office records in 1983.
Atari purchased the rights to turn it into a videogame, rushing its production to release it by Christmas. However, the game was a total flop: unattractive, unplayable, and lacking a compelling storyline.
The consequences for Atari were dire.
In the following year, the company lost over $530M: a performance that led to its disintegration and sale. Retailers, angry at Atari's practices, demanded to sell its titles at steep discounts and asked Atari to cover the disposal costs of thousands of unsold cartridges.
In response, Atari took a drastic step.
One night, they buried over 790,000 video game cartridges and unsold consoles in a landfill near Alamogordo, covering them with a layer of cement.
This act of burying video game cartridges in the desert became the stuff of legends, fueling rumors and speculation for years.
The legend persisted until 2014 when a documentary crew, in collaboration with Microsoft's Xbox Entertainment Studios, decided to excavate the landfill to confirm the story.
To everyone's surprise, the excavation was successful, unearthing numerous videogame cartridges, including copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
We learn from crashes
1983 marked the videogame crash, a catastrophic decline that signaled a severe recession for the entire videogame industry.
While the sector generated $3.2Bn that year, it plummeted to only $100M by 1985, with a staggering 97% loss. The rise of popular home computers, particularly the Commodore64, and its competitive pricing, contributed to the industry's sudden downturn.
The videogame crash came on the heels of a period of enthusiastic investments and rapidly rising stock prices, mirroring recent events in the cryptocurrency and tech stock markets. This led to significant layoffs in the industry, similar to the challenges faced by the tech sector today.
As we wait to see how AI companies will fare in the face of recent trends, it's crucial for leaders and tech innovators to take lessons from history.
We might think that a trend is clear and certain but, as Balaji Srinivasan highlighted in one of his tweets, the future is not inevitable:
We do not know if the world of tomorrow will evolve identically to the one of yesterday.
We can use the past as a tool to imagine the future, of course, but also not to repeat the same mistakes.
As external consultants advising organizations, we are often seen as the adults in the room.
We are the expert cartographers paid to decipher maps, identify the paths that lead to treasures, and avoid those to shipwrecks and dashed hopes.
It's our role to study those maps meticulously.
Not just the ones with success stories but, perhaps more critically, the ones marked with failure.
