The New Mexico City, Alamogordo, is selling Atari 2600 cartridges on eBay (click here) that were unearthed from a landfill this past spring. This includes copies of the legendary E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game, which is said to be one of the major reasons for the North American video game crash of 1983 and the demise of Atari in the gaming sector.
About 100 cartridges, some still in the box, are up for auction with starting bids of $50. Boxed copies of E.T. are commanding the highest bids, upward of $405 as of this writing. The exhumed Atari cartridges come with a numbered certificate of authenticity from the city of Alamogordo, a city property ID tag and "a narrative with photos of the 1983 burial and the 2014 excavation proving the legend to be true." Otherwise, the cartridges are "sold as-is" and aren't guaranteed to work, should a buyer attempt to play them. The games up for sale on eBay are part of a lot of 1,300 cartridges that the city voted to distribute earlier this year. In an excavation of the legendary landfill, where Atari was long-rumored to have dumped tons of excess inventory, some 792,000 games are said to have been recovered. - polygon.com
Back in 1982, Steven Spielberg wowed audiences with
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The leading video game company at that time was Atari wanted to cash in on the success of the film, so they purchased the rights to make a game for
$21 million. Normally, a video game at that time took five months to produce but Atari let their ego and a lucrative Christmas release date push them to produce the game in five short weeks. The game was a disaster. Just to breakeven on the rights the company had to sell 4 million copies. 5 million copies were produced and only 1.5 million were sold. Most of those 1.5 million copies that were sold, ended up being returned to the company because the quality of the game was THAT horrendous. The unsold games were then taken to a New Mexico landfill and buried. For decades, people didn't know if it was an urban legend or not.
Last April, The Avengers screenwriter Zak Penn led the search for the burial site and surprisingly found it. He was part of the team that unearthed copies of the E.T. game, along with many other games that were not sold or were returned, like: Asteroids, Defender, Centipede, Missile Command, Warlords, Phoenix, Swordquest and Star Raiders.
On November 20th, you can watch "Atari: Game Over" a documentary on the excavation that Zak Penn produced. It will debut on Xbox One, Xbox 360, and xboxvideo.com. You can watch the trailer below.