ET Landfill Auctions Generate $107,000
In April of 2014, an excavation took place in Alamagordo, New Mexico….site of the former landfill that, rumor held, was the graveyard of the Atari corporation: the place where they had to bury their shame and all their bad business decisions, specifically millions of ET cartridges. The game supposedly so bad that the dump consisted of nothing but ET carts.
The excavation was covered by the media and presented in the documentary Atari: Game Over a few months later (still viewable on Netflix). They discovered a half-truth: while Atari did have to bury thousands of unsold merchandise due to the collapsing video game market, and most of the blame for that collapse was on their shoulders, it wasn’t all ET carts that had been dumped. They made up a lot of the inventory, to be sure, but there were plenty of other games and peripherals that weren’t selling as fast either.
After the Atari dump of legend had been dug up, the crew and the city agreed to auction off most of what they’d found on eBay. Gamespot reported how the money was divided. The city of Alamogordo would receive some of the profits as well as the Tularosa Basin Historical Society. The last auction wrapped up this week, and the former will get $65,000 while the latter will get $16,250. All in all, people in 45 states and 14 countries purchased the historically significant carts, culminating in a grand total of $107,000 in gross earnings.
When you deduct the $26,600 in shipping fees and other expenses, $80,400 isn’t bad for trash.