The dusty town of Alamogordo in New Mexico has announced that in a series of eBay auctions, 881 of the early-1980s Atari video game cartridges that were buried for decades in the desert have sold for a grand total of $107,930,15.
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Alamogordo will receive about $65,000 (£42,000) from the sale of the games, with $16,000 (£10,400) going to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society, a local museum. Shipping costs alone for the games topped $26,000. The long standing urban legend behind the excavation was that Atari buried a massive amount of “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” and other Atari cartridges in a New Mexico landfill following the abysmal sales of the game.
A documentary about the dig, Atari: Game Over, premiered in November 2014. It’s true the game was a financial disaster and played a role in Atari’s demise, but considering that lead designer Howard Scott Warsaw had a mere five and half weeks to complete the title (after Atari secured the rights to E.T.in July, 1982, Steven Spielberg was adamant that a game be ready in time of the holidays), it’s not surprising that several elements of the title needed more polish.
The most expensive sale was of an E.T. cartridge, which went for $1,535.
Joe Lewandowski discovered the games buried under rubbish at a site 200 miles south of Alberqurque. Buyers came from 45 states and 14 countries.
The Atari 2600 release of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial has been partially blamed for the video game crash of 1983.
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Lewandowski said there are still 297 games holding in the archive, but there is no definite plan to what will become of them. “I might sell those if a second movie comes out, but for now we’re just holding them”, he said, adding that a reboot of E.T. the film could increase the value of the games for the city. It earned a reputation as the worst video game ever created. Of the cartridges recovered during the dig, 100 went to the studio and 23 ended up in museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and others in Canada and Germany.
