Game:

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Duration: 1:51

856 views

4

Hundreds of copies of E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial from the Atari were dug up during an excavation in New Mexico earlier this year, and are now set to be sold on eBay. Apparently the city of Alamogordo had a unanimous 7-0 vote to put some of the 800 titles up for auction via eBay and the city’s official website, and the auction is set to start in a couple of weeks and end before next year.

The copies are currently being stored in the New Mexico Museum of Space History, under the watch of the Tularosa Basin Historical Society. I mostly just find the journey here super funny, because the game was this giant failure back in 1982 because they rushed it to release alongside the E.T movie. I mean, it was so bad that it was supposed to have actually contributed to a videogame industry collapse that occurred in the 1980s thanks to a saturation of way too many crappy games, so people just stopped buying them.

So, then, Atari had all these copies of this super crappy game that they couldn’t sell and so they buried them in the desert and for ages the whole thing was this urban myth until they got dug back up recently. There’s definitely a lot of history in these games and I feel like they’ll auction for some pretty hefty prices as a result, but you’re still getting a game that was so unwanted that Atari decided to bury it in a freaking desert just to get rid of it.

Apparently Alamogordo is going to keep like 500 copies of the game and the Museum of Rome wants some too… Where were all of these avid E.T. supporters back in 1982!? Atari needed you, man. You only started caring now because it’s cool or hipster or something.

Other Statistics