Collection of buried Atari cartridges sells for over $100,000

One town's trash is another man's treasure.

Given, calling the stash of old video games found in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico “trash” isn’t entirely fair. The Atari 2600 cartridges, which were buried after the video game crash of 1983, quickly became an urban legend. The town decided to solve the mystery last April by digging up the landfill, resulting in a hoard of old, busted games.

So are they worth anything? It turns out that yes, they most certainly are. The city has wrapped up its sale of 881 cartridges found in the landfill, earning $107,930 through a series of eBay auctions. (To save you the math, that works out to $122.50 per cartridge.)

Showcasing the fanatical interest in the long-buried cartridges, officials say they found buyers from across the world, including Australia, France, Brazil and Singapore. Shipping costs alone for the games topped $26,000.

The city of Alamogordo will receive $65,037 of the funds, with an additional $16,259 going to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society.

Though most famous for housing tons of unsold copies of the terrible E.T. game, a wealth of other Atari titles were found in the landfill. Titles like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pele's Soccer, Yar's Revenge, Baseball, Centipede, and Warlords comprised the bulk of the Alamogordo sale. There was at least one copy of E.T. in the mix, selling for a whopping $1,535 to become the single biggest earner.

Alamogordo kept most of the cartridges from the dig. Filmmakers were allowed to take 100 and 23 were given to museums.

Joe Lewandowski, the garbage contractor who remembered burying the games and was responsible for helping the crew locate them last year, says he's still holding on to 297 E.T. cartridges, partially in hopes that Hollywood, which has seemingly never met a film it's not willing to make again, attempts to remake the classic.

"There's 297 we're still holding in an archive that we'll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them," he said. "I might sell those if a second movie comes out but for now we're just holding them."

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