E.T. finally found a home. Maybe it wasn’t his home, but the Extra Terrestrial, and hundreds of other old Atari games buried in the New Mexico desert are going to end up in someone’s house.
If you’re not familiar with the story, years ago, hundreds of unsold Atari video cartridges were buried in the New Mexico sand. These games were considered huge failures and that’s were people bury failures (or the New Jersey pine barrens if you’re on the East coast).
The cartridges were unearthed and the City of Alamogordo sold 100 of the unearthed games on eBay for more than $37,000.
“It seemed like every seven to 10 minutes it went up a thousand dollars, a thousand dollars, so it was just instantaneously 24, 25, 26. It just kept on going way beyond anything we expected,” said Tularosa Basin Historical Society Vice President Joe Lewandowski.
The highest bid for one of the cartridges inside its original box was $1,537. It went to a person in Canada. People from as far away as Germany, Ecuador and Sweden got a piece of the prize.
The City of Alamogordo still has over 700 Atari dig games left. Get your debit cards ready.
H/T KRQE