Atari landfill excavation
 

For those of you who know your gaming history, surely you know about the famous Video Game Crash of 1983 and the Atari Landfill, where Atari buried truckloads of 2600 products (most being copies of ET The Extra Terrestrial). This became one of the largest urban legends in the gaming community with many conspiracy theories around it.

Today, excavation on the area began as part of a documentary to be released by Microsoft (for exclusive viewing on Xbox 360/Xbox One). Within a few hours, the first findings of Atari products have surfaced. The event was open to the public, and many were excited to see what was found. Crews will continue digging to see what else they can discover.

I never once doubted the existence of such a burial due to small tidbits of evidence, notably newspaper articles, and few prominent people from the time and industry outright saying it never happened. Even Atari admitted that they were dumping "inoperable" product into the landfill, albeit just as a guise to avoid marring their public image.

Anyway, I am curious what other things they might find in the rubble. They have already found an unopened copy of Centipede alongside the E.T. games, and the Wikipedia article mentions that titles like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Berzerk (misspelled as "Bezerk"), Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Defender had been noted before.

This page will probably get updated soon with similar details, but here it is as of a few days ago before this excavation started (as of the time of making this post):
http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

There were millions of unsold copies, they had to go somewhere.

Personally I think the Atari version of PacMan is worse then ET.

This is amazing to me. I personally thought these were just rumors made up by gamers to give an excuse of why these products simply disappeared out of thin air. I hope to see more about this. This is a huge moment in gaming history

After this excavation, some museums are showing interest in acquiring some of the "garbage". Two of these being the famous Smithsonian and the New Mexico Museum of Space History.

As all the game items were buried in Alamogordo, they are property of the city and they will decide what to do with them. Mayor Susie Galea says she would like to open to the public the ability to purchase some of these games.

Source

Anyone want to buy a copy of ET that was buried in garbage for 30 years? If they are cheap enough and come with a certificate of authenticity or something, I totally would buy one just for the sake of having a piece of gaming history.

Ah, I see, they want to promote tourism in the area, which isn't a bad idea. I hope the prospect works out for them, and yes, I would probably buy something too to own a piece of gaming history, as long as it's sealed in some kind of bag (to keep the contaminants at bay) and cheap enough.

Just bumping this thread with an update. Many cartridges were listed for sale on eBay two weeks ago and ended a few days ago. All of them had opening bids of $50 and included the game, box/manuals if applicable, and a certificate of authenticity.

The lowest selling game was this boxed Missile Command for $157.50.

The highest selling game was this boxed ET for a whopping $1,537.00! Overall 8 copies of ET were sold for over $1000

You can view all the completed auctions here. There will be more auctions coming soon.

And as you can imagine, the seller is getting funny feedback from the buyers.

I can somewhat understand the boxed ones, but $700 for a cartridge-only ET that is pretty comparable to some of the junk that some people have? Man, people must be paying just for that certificate. ;)