ET Cartridge From Desert Sells For $1,500

Atari cartridges dug up from the New Mexico desert have so far raised more than $100,000 at auction. The haul included copies of the infamous ET game which fell far short of sales expectations.

The game sold around 1.5 million copies, leaving between 2.5 and 3.5 million unsold thanks to extremely poor reviews. For years the rumor mill had it that the remaining copies were dumped into landfill near Alamogordo.

In April last year that rumor was proven at least partially correct when a documentary company paid for the rights to excavate the site and found it did indeed contain a range of Atari cartridges including, but not limited to, ET.

The company has now auctioned 881 of the cartridges on eBay, raising a total of $107,930.15, an average of $122 per cartridge. Perhaps unsurprisingly the highest price was for an ET game at $1,535. That shows the value of a good background story as with 1.5 million copies in circulation, simply having a copy of the game (that wasn’t buried) isn’t that rare and it can fetch as little as $10 on eBay.

The money, minus fees and shipping, is to be split between the city of Alamogordo and a local historical society. Joe Lewandowski, who oversaw the excavation, says he’d like to see the city spend the money on something more ambitious than day to day maintenance.

Of the rest of the haul, 100 cartridges went to the film company, 23 have been donated to museums, and 297 have been kept in an archive by the historical society for possible future sale.