Tomb of Atari games sell for $169,000

The cartridges ballooned in value as collectors clamoured for a piece of a video-game myth. Photo / Getty Images

Jason Baldwin remembers playing ET the Extra-Terrestrial on his Atari console when he was growing up in Alamogordo, New Mexico: It was awful. Not an hour after he started playing, he gave up on it.

Years later, he heard rumours that the game was so bad that Atari trashed thousands of cartridges in his hometown, a city of 31,000 in southwest New Mexico. Turns out, the rumours weren't far off. Hundreds of thousands of Atari games — not just ET — were buried in the city landfill in the company's waning years.

The massive cache of video-game detritus has made for a payday in Alamogordo. A crew dug up a sliver of the massive collection, and the city auctioned about 900 games one by one to amass a tidy sum — just under US$108,000 (NZ$169,000).

"I didn't think they would fetch as much as they did," said Baldwin, a city commissioner in Alamogordo. "I believe my fellow city commissioners thought if we sold $5,000 worth or $10,000 worth, we could make some improvements to the dump area and maybe put up a little plaque or something."

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Now, Susie Galea, Alamogordo's mayor, says the town will likely use some of the proceeds to build a memorial to what she calls the "myth of Atari's tomb".

The games weren't worth all that much in their own right, Rick Weis, who has collected about 2,000 cartridges for Atari 2600 games, said in an email. They're fairly common titles, most worth $5 or so.

But the cartridges ballooned in value as collectors clamoured for a piece of a video-game myth, a tangible and smelly slice of history representing an industry giant's undoing.

The legend goes like this: The game (a tie-in to the popular 1982 movie) was so bad that it led to Atari's downfall in 1983 — so bad that the company cut its losses and buried millions of cartridges in the desert. And not just any desert: Alamogordo is where Ham, the first chimp to go to space, was buried. Roswell, New Mexico, is a two-hour drive to the east, and the Trinity Site, where atomic bombs were tested, is two hours north.

The reality isn't filled with so much intrigue: In 1983, Atari was stumbling and started looking to get rid of surplus. As Galea tells it, Atari had a warehouse in nearby El Paso, and Alamogordo's dump had lax environmental rules. The disposal wasn't much of a secret: Researchers say it was noted in newspaper articles at the time.

But nostalgia and fandom swirled around last year's project to excavate the games. Andrew Reinhard, an archaeologist on the project who runs the website Archaeogaming, said he watched ET games that were listed online for $2 the morning of the dig go for $10 later in the day. Months later, a cartridge from the landfill sold for more than $1,500.

"Collectors find value that you and I would maybe raise our eyebrows about. Collectors find value in things that we may devalue," said Raiford Guins, a Stony Brook University professor who studies video-game history and has researched the landfill. In those circles, he said, the landfill games have become "the holy grail for Atari collectors."

The history of the cartridges pulled from the dump — of the urban legend surrounding them, if not the games themselves — justifies the steep price they command, said Weis, the collector.

He owns just about every game made for the Atari 2600, but shelled out for a copy of Centipede, a game that usually sells for a fraction of the $70 he paid.

"Even if it's not the famous ET burial, it will still be very historic for our community," Weis said. "I wanted a small piece of it."