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.
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.