E.T. and other Atari games excavated from New Mexico landfill hit eBay

Shawn Knight

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landfilled atari ebay atari auction landfill et alamogordo et extra terrestrial

All sorts of items can be found for sale on eBay and now, you can add garbage to the list. The City of Alamogordo has listed 99 Atari games for sale that have spent the last 30+ years buried in a New Mexico landfill.

As the idiom goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

If you recall, hundreds of Atari game cartridges were excavated from the landfill earlier this year as part of a documentary on the once-thriving video game company. The dig sought to confirm rumors that Atari had dumped a slew of cartridges in the landfill way back in 1983 following the disastrous launch of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial.

landfilled atari ebay atari auction landfill et alamogordo et extra terrestrial

The game is largely considered to be the worst video game ever made.

The auctions will run for the next week and include copies of Asteroids, Missile Command, Warlords, Defender, Star Raiders, Swordquest, Phoenix, Centipede and of course, the dreaded E.T.

As of writing, most of the games have been bid up to around $50 or so but the E.T. games are commanding the most money. Cartridge-only auctions are currently bid up to around $150 while select boxed versions have already passed the $500 mark.

Each auction includes the game as shown, a city property I.D. tag, a certificate of authenticity and a narrative with photos of the 1983 burial and the 2014 excavation proving the legend to be true. Naturally, one shouldn’t expect these games to be in working condition.

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Trying to dig up something that nobody wanted in the first place is kind of retarded.
 
All sorts of items can be found for sale on eBay and now, you can add garbage to the list.
Obviously not very well acquainted with eBay. Garbage makes up quite a sizable percentage of their listings.
 
This settles it! The intelligence has been completely bred out of our species.

Or else why would something that has been billed as, "the worst video game ever", after having been in a dump for 30 years, command a $500.00 price on Ebay....?:(
 
So the downward recursive spiral toward Australopithecus began with Ebay as an entity, and this is just the latest incident?
I'd go with the latter. eBay seems more like a worldwide yard sale (or outright garbage disposal) and unofficial bracket ranking for world class klepto's.

Devolution might have more insidious triggers:

Daytime TV ( Soaps, inane chat shows, and so many "personal improvement" shows that it doesn't leave any actual time for personal improvement).
TV remote control (Efficient 2-in-1 method of instilling attention deficit behaviour and laziness).
The Internet (Converting useful time into an extended Blipvert since the late nineties).
The mobile phone, texting, and social networking (Speeding us from a (partly) literate society into language made up of pictures and txtspk.....not a million miles from cave painting, hand signals, and grunting is it?)
 
The less time some of you spend worrying about other peoples interests will allow you more time to do the things you enjoy.
 
The less time some of you spend worrying about other peoples interests will allow you more time to do the things you enjoy.
What happens if "worrying about other people's interests", is what you enjoy?

The proliferation of trash magazines, such as, "People", along with a cavalcade of, "entertainment news programs", seem to indicate the the great human pursuit, perhaps even, "the 11th commandment", is stuffing your nose up your neighbor's backside.

I surely don't need to mention, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ad naseum, as a place where people you don't know, have never met, and perhaps don't even like, are your "friends", and you share everything with them, up to and including, your bank PIN number.

Before the web, there was gossip in real life, now the internet has become, "gossip's abstraction layer".
 
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