When crap and trash is cash !!

The ET Atari Burial Search

The dusty town of Alamogordo in New Mexico has announced that in a series of eBay auctions, 881 of the early-1980s Atari video game cartridges that were buried for decades in the desert have sold for a grand total of $107,930.15.

Last April, a film crew and a dig crew hired by Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment Studios dug up an old garbage dump outside of Alamogordo, looking for Atari cartridges dumped in the fall of 1983. The dumping was precipitated by the North American Video Game Crash of 1983 and the total bomb of a game that was E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, which was written on a rush schedule and quickly gained a reputation among Atari players for being too punishing and complex. When Atari shut down its El Paso, Texas, factory that year, the company had a variety of its game cartridges—not just the E.T. ones—thrown out.

While a brief New York Times clip from that year confirmed that Atari had dumped the games, Atari itself never confirmed or denied the dump of tens or hundreds of thousands of its game cartridges. So naturally, rumors grew, with doubters and believers on each side, until the Atari E.T. dump became stuff of urban legend. But Joe Lewandowski, a garbage contractor in the Alamogordo area, remembered pieces of the event, and decades later he used some careful detective work to pinpoint just where in the vast desert the trove was buried (see the video below for a description of how Lewandowski found the dump location decades later).

A small sample of the cartridges was exhumed and used in the Xbox documentary. In September, the city of Alamogordo decided to sell hundreds of those cartridges on eBay, including Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pele's Soccer, Yar's Revenge, Baseball, Centipede, and Warlords.

Lewandowski went before the Alamogordo City Commissioners last week to report that the sales of the games raked in more than $100,000, $65,037.78 of which will go directly to the city of Alamogordo. Another $16,259.44 will go to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society. Shipping fees totaled more than $26,000 and were used to send the games to buyers around the US and in countries including Brazil, Austrailia, Singapore, France, and Canada.




From Wikipedia
Partially-surviving cases and cartridges retrieved during the excavation. E.T., Centipede, and other Atari materials can be seen. On May 28, 2013, the Alamogordo City Commission granted Fuel Industries, a Canadian entertainment company, six months of access to the landfill to film a documentary called Atari: Game Over about the burial and to excavate the dump site. Xbox Entertainment Studios planned to air this documentary series as an exclusive to the Xbox One and Xbox 360 in 2014 as part of a multi-part documentary series being produced by Lightbox, a US/UK production company. Though the excavation was momentarily stalled due to a complaint by the New Mexico Environmental Protection Division Solid Waste Bureau citing potential hazards, the issues were resolved in early April 2014 to allow the excavation to proceed.

Excavation started on April 26, 2014 as an open event to the public. E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial designer Howard Scott Warshaw, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline and film director Zak Penn attended the event as part of a documentary about the burial, as did local residents such as Armando Ortega, a city official who is reportedly one of the original children to raid the dump in 1983. Ortega stated that although he and his friends found dozens of quality games, they gave the E.T. cartridges away because the "game sucked ... you couldn't finish it". James Heller, the former Atari manager in charge of the original burial, was also on hand at the excavation. Heller revealed that he had originally ordered the site to be covered in concrete. Contrary to the urban legend that claims millions of cartridges were buried there, Heller stated that only 728,000 cartridges were buried.

Remnants of E.T. and other Atari games were discovered in the early hours of the excavation, as reported by Microsoft's Larry Hyrb. A team of archaeologists was present to examine and document the Atari material unearthed by excavation machinery: Andrew Reinhard (American School of Classical Studies at Athens), Richard Rothaus (Trefoil Cultural and Environmental), Bill Caraher (University of North Dakota), with support from video game historian Raiford Guins (SUNY - Stony Brook) and historian Bret Weber (University of North Dakota).

Only about 1300 cartridges of the estimated 700,000 were removed from the burial, as the remaining materials were deeper than expected, and made them more difficult to access, according to Alamogordo mayor Susie Galea. The burial was refilled following this event.[48] Joseph Lewandowski, who had worked to arrange the unearthing with the city, said that this was a one-time shot to recover materials from the site, as they do not expect the city to agree to a similar event again.[49]

The documentary Atari: Game Over, which features the burial site and its excavation, was released on November 20, 2014.[50][51]

Curation and auction
Of the recovered materials, a fraction has been given to the New Mexico Museum of Space History for display, and another 100 to the documentary producers Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment. Galea believes the remaining cartridges can be sold by the city of Alamogordo through the Museum of Space History. She hopes that the sale of these games can help fund recognition of the burial site as a tourist attraction in the future. The City of Alamogordo approved the auction of the games in September 2014, to be sold through eBay and the Alamogordo Council website. As of September 2015, over $107,000 has been raised through the sales of about 880 unearthed cartridges, with one E.T. copy selling for more than $1,500. About 300 cartridges remain to be sold at a later date given the historical value of the cartridges.

One of the E.T. cartridges that had been dug up was taken by the Smithsonian Institution for its records, calling the cartridge both representative of the burial site but also in terms of video games, how the cartridge represents "the ongoing challenge of making a good film to a video game adaptation, the decline of Atari, the end of an era for video game manufacturing, and the video game cartridge life cycle".