Mythical Buried Atari Games Sell For Big Money At Auction
Last April, a group of people and the town of Alamogordo in New Mexico decided to see if the myth of thousands of cartridges of E.T. The Extraterrestrial was buried in a landfill nearby. The myth turned out to be true — to an extent — and thousands of games were found buried based on evidence pieced together from a news story and pictures detailing the massive burial of games. You can witness the discovery in the documentary Atari: Game Over if you want to know even more about it. The big news today is that the games found in the ground were sold for a over a whopping $100,000.
“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”
Never underestimate a nerds want of classic video games that have been buried in a landfill for decades. You never know what you might find when digging through dozens of feet of old garbage. However, I’m pretty sure most landfills won’t find you walking away with a treasure trove of video games — probably just Jet Moto for Playstation.
(Via Worthly)
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