Atari games recovered from landfill sold for $100k

 

Copies of the Atari 2600 video game based on E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial may be selling better now that they did when they were new, as the cartridges of title was among those recovered last year from a New Mexico landfill that sold for $100,000 over the weekend.

The games, which according to the Associated Press (AP) were excavated from a landfill in the city of Alamorgodro in April 2014, sold on eBay for nearly $108,000. A total of 881 cartridges, including classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Defender, Missile Command, and Warlords were auctioned off to buyers from 45 states and 14 countries, the wire service reported.

Another 23 games have been donated to various museums, including the Smithsonian, and Joe Lewandowski, the man who led last year’s dig, said that there are nearly 300 others that the team is not sure what they want to do with yet. About $65,000 of the auction proceeds will be given to Alamorgodro, while $16,000 will go to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society, and approximately $26,000 will be used to cover expenses such as shipping fees.

Lewandowski, whose dig was featured in the 2014 Zak Penn documentary Atari: Game Over, told the Alamogordo Daily News that the remaining 297 games “might” be sold if a second movie comes out, “but for now we’re just holding them… we’ll sell [them] at a later date when we decide what to do with them.” He added that the film company received 100 of the recovered games.

A look back at the infamous story of E.T.

The discovery of the E.T. game cartridges confirmed that long-held urban legends that copies of the game had been buried at the New Mexico landfill roughly three decades ago. Based on the popular Steven Spielberg movie of the same name, it was released back in 1982 after only 34 days of development, quickly earning a reputation as one of the worst games ever made.

As reported by redOrbit last April, reports first surfaced in 1983 that 14 trucks carrying unsold Atari products were transported from a factory in El Paso, Texas to Alamogordo, as due in part to E.T., a lousy Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, and several other poorly-received titles, the game giant found itself in financial trouble – the beginning of the infamous industry “crash”.

Samuel Claiborn of IGN.com called E.T. “Atari’s final, and costliest, blunder of that era.” The game had to be completed in just one-fourth of the time spent developing most video games of the era, he explained. While it went on to sell 1.5 million copies, it was still considered to be a massive disappointment, confirming its status as one of the most infamous games ever made.

—–

Feature image: taylorhatmaker/Flickr Creative Commons