It seems one man’s trash really is another man’s treasure.
Atari cartridges pulled from a landfill site in Alamogordo, New Mexico earlier this year are doing great business on auction site eBay. The City of Alamogordo has already made $37,000 selling just 100 of the unearthed games, and it has another 700 still to auction off. The games are in very poor condition, as you’d expect after 30 years spent underground, but it hasn’t stopped one copy of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, in its original box, selling for $1,537.
When you can buy a regular E.T. cartridge from eBay for a couple of bucks, it demonstrates just how important this dig — closely linked to the game industry crash of the 1980s — is to video game enthusiasts.
Back in April, creative studio Fuel Entertainment dug up the Atari cartridges and filmed the excavation for a documentary. It ended three decades of speculation over whether Atari Corp., then a major player in the game industry, had really trashed thousands of copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, widely considered the worst video game ever made. Atari made way too many copies of the game, which it rushed to tie-in with the Steven Spielberg movie, and it never really recovered from the move. The dig also uncovered copies of games like Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command, which Atari clearly couldn’t sell at the time.
Above: The certificate is important, otherwise people will think you just dirtied a completely unburied copy of the worst game ever!
Tularosa Basin Historical Society vice president Joe Lewandowski was a key member of the dig team. He’s amazed by the prices the game cartridges have sold for on eBay.
“It just kept on going way beyond anything we expected,” he told KRQE News. “It’s really gratifying to see that happening because … to everybody it was a bunch of garbage in the landfill. [They said,] ‘You’re kind of nutty to go dig it up.’”
All of the money raised is going to the City of Alamogordo and the Tularosa Basin Historical Society, helping to pay back the $50,000 it cost to arrange the dig.
The documentary chronicling the dig is airing on Nov. 20 on Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC (via video.xbox.com). It’s free to watch, and you don’t need an Xbox Live subscription.