If you were lucky enough to visit a landfill in New Mexico you might have come across some buried treasure. Namely in the form of Atari catridges. It was an urban legend that after 1983 a massive pile of Atari Games were buried. But last April the town decided to dig up the landfill to quell any rumors. What they found was a giant hoard of old and busted games.
Fast forward to today and it turns out they’re worth something. The city has wrapped up its sale of 881 cartridges found in the landfill, earning $107,930 through a series of eBay auctions. Buyers were found from all over the world and shipping costs exceeded $26,000. The city of Alamogordo will receive $65,037 of the funds, with an additional $16,259 going to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society.
Far and away the most famous sell was the historically terrible E.T. game. However other titles were found: Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pele’s Soccer, Yar’s Revenge, Baseball, Centipede, and Warlords. The long copy of E.T. sold for a whopping $1,535 to become the single biggest earner.
Joe Lewandowski, the garbage contractor who remembered burying the games and was responsible for helping the crew locate them last year, says he’s still holding on to 297 E.T. cartridges, “There’s 297 we’re still holding in an archive that we’ll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them,” he said. “I might sell those if a second movie comes out but for now we’re just holding them.”
