Dive Brief:

• The Tularosa Basin Historical Society in Alamogordo, NM has started selling the “E.T the Extra Terrestrial” Atari games excavated from a New Mexico landfill in April.
• The cartridges are being offered on the auction site eBay. While one copy has a current bid of $400, some are garnering zero interest and aren’t getting any bites. 
• The auction for the now-infamous video game ends on November 13.

Dive Insight:

The vice president of the historical society, Joe Lewandowski, supervised the excavation at the landfill this spring. In an interesting twist, Lewandowski was said to be on-site when Atari originally buried the cartridges at the landfill in 1983. 

Atari disposed of the cartridges after the video game proved to be a failure with consumers. In this modern-day legend, millions of cartridges were allegedly dumped at the site. A documentary film, “Atari: Game Over,” tells the tale of Atari, and is expected to premiere sometime this fall. Until then, get your E.T. fix by watching a trailer depicting scenes from the documentary that were shot on-location during the dig.