Over 800 Atari video games that were found buried at an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill last year were put up for auction on eBay and sold for over $100,000 in total. The discovery of the games confirmed an urban legend that Atari buried hundreds of unsold game cartridges after the infamous E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial video game flopped in 1982.
Operational Consultant Joe Lewandowski announced at the Alamogordo City Commission meeting last week that the final sale total reached $107,930.15, reports the Alamogordo News. Of that, the city will receive $65,000 and the Tularosa Basin Historical Society gets $16,000.
The sale included 881 cartridges, with six heading to Brazil and Australia, 54 to Canada, 22 to France and three to Singapore. The rest were bought by U.S. collectors.
Lewandowski said that there are still 297 cartridges left that they haven’t decided what to do with yet.
“I might sell those if a second movie comes out but for now we're just holding them. The film company got 100 games, 23 went to museums and we had 881 that we actually sold. They were sold in 45 states and 14 countries,” Lewandowski said.
The dig was the subject of the documentary Atari: Game Over, which was directed by Zak Penn. It was always an urban legend that Atari had buried cartridges at the time of the Video Game Crash of 1983, but Lewandowski’s team confirmed that it was true.