Unearthed E.T. Atari Games Up For Sale

Back in April someone was sifting through a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico and unearthed hundreds of old Atari cartridges and starting earlier this week all the games went up for sale on EBay. The video games and other components from Atari were buried in the Alamogordo Landfill in 1983. The city, through the Tularosa Basin Historical Society, has made the decision to allow a limited number to be sold to the general public. The historical society's president, Joe Lewandowski, says that if the sale of the first 100 cartridges go well they will release up to 800 more games,
"We don't have an idea of how much they're going to be. No one has ever done this before, and after this no one is ever going to do it again. We're selling them on Ebay because it's the best thing to hit worldwide and this is a worldwide phenomenon. I got people from England, Spain, Italy, Thailand, and basically places all over the world asking for them."

As of right now they will be releasing 9 different titles - Asteroids, Missile Command, Warlords, Defender, Star Raiders, Swordquest, Phoenix, Centipede, and of course E.T. the Extra-terrestrial. For years there's been rumors that Atari dumped all their leftover inventory into landfills across the U.S. after the company went under. Urban legend grew and grew even sparking books about the subject until the city of Alamogordo decided to lend some truth to the rumors and open up one of their landfills. No one really knows why Atari decided to dump their games in unidentified landfills. Lewandowski said there is still 792,000 cartridges in the landfill but it is costly to dig them up, he just wanted to prove the legend was real. Lewandowski said Atari dumped over 3.5 million other games in different landfills across the country but cannot disclose where,

"It took so long to dig the games up because I didn't know people were interested in it. Over the years people would ask me about it because they knew I was from Alamogordo. I never thought anything of it until the Discovery Channel called and they started asking about it. There was another movie company that called and a professor from New York University who was writing a book also called about it too. That's when I got online and looked up Atari dump. There was million of hits. I was shocked, I thought there could be a real story here."

So if you got a couple of extra bucks burning a hole in your pocket and an Ebay account get yourself some old school Atari games. Unfortunately, Lewandowski says a majority of the games are unplayable due to the fact that they've been buried under piles of trash for close to 30 years. It would still be cool to own a piece of Atari history though. Even if it is one of the worst games ever made, E.T the Extra Terrestrial.
Alamogordo News has the story