Dive Brief:
- Some of the “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” Atari video game cartridges excavated from a landfill in Alamogordo, NM will hit the auction block in the near future.
- Atari event organizer Joe Lewandowski said that the market will will determine the price. Lewandowski mentioned the Smithsonian and state and local museums have expressed an interest in displaying the games in their collections.
- The city of Alamogordo owns the cartridges because they were mined from city property. Officials could begin selling the video games within the next two weeks.
Dive Insight:
The cartridges were dumped at the landfill in the 1980s -- not exactly a surprising fate for a game that was universally panned and deemed a failure after millions of copies remained unsold.
In April, hundreds of Atari cartridges were dug up from the landfill site as a video crew filmed the entire process. The excavation will be portrayed in a documentary film, “Atari: Game Over.”