Sales of Dumped Atari ET Games Earned Over $100,000USD
In 1983, Atari condemned over a thousand E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game catridges to a mass burial in a New Mexico landfill site. In 2014, one man by the name Joe Lewandowski was determined to find them and uncovered the long hidden loot.
The E.T. video game by Atari is notoriously known to be one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history and the "worst video game of all time". For years, press and gamers had spoken of the burial site where Atari was long-rumored to have dumped tons of excess inventory, but it eventually faded into urban legend. It remained simply a legend for 30 years, until Lewandowski exposed the truth behind the rumour, with a whopping 792,000 games said to have been recovered.
In April last year, Lewandowski dug up hundreds of E.T. games that were dumped and buried in the New Mexico City of Alamogordo, and recently announced that he has sold 881 games through eBay so far, generating more than $100,000USD in sales!
The exhumed Atari cartridges come with a numbered certificate of authenticity from the city of Alamogordo, a city property ID tag and "a narrative with photos of the 1983 burial and the 2014 excavation proving the legend to be true." Otherwise, the cartridges are "sold as-is" and aren't guaranteed to work, should a buyer attempt to play them.
The E.T. video game was widely held as responsible for millions of dollars in losses for Atari, and is often referred to as one of the reasons Atari stopped producing video games.
Not only has Lewandowski rediscovered the game and other Atari paraphenalia buried at the site, but he has also filmed his journey of discovery and has made it into a documentary called "Atari: Game Over".
You can watch the trailer for the documentary below:
