Atari E.T. cartridges from landfill up on eBay

Have you seen Angry Video Game Nerd – The Movie? If not, let me tell you that it’s about the notorious Atari E.T. game, considered to be the worst game in the history of video games. In the movie, Angry Video Game Nerd is pestered by his peers to review Atari E.T. so that everybody can see how bad the game actually is. While Angry Video Game Nerd doesn’t want to do it, his friends convince him to go to the landfill where Atari supposedly buried all the cartridges and memorabilia of the horrible video game. Atari E.T. is considered to be the game that led to the downfall of the once gracious video game company.

It turns out, that Atari E.T. cartridges had actually been buried in a landfill near New-Mexico. Up until last year, this was only considered to be an urban legend, but when contractors hired by Microsoft actually discovered a mountain of games, including Atari E.T. buried in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the legend turned into reality. Atari E.T. has become a legendary game since it was first released in the 1980s. According to the urban legend, millions of Atari E.T. cartridges were buried in the landfill because the company was ashamed that it created such a bad game. What you need to know about Atari E.T. is that it came out as the worst video game in the world not because Atari didn’t know what it was doing, but because the game engineers were rushed into releasing a game they wanted to work on for more than a year in just five weeks time.

Since the urban legend about Atari E.T. turned into reality, there has been many hype around the video game many had completely forgotten about. I’m sure that those born in the ’90s haven’t even heard of Atari E.T. before the games were actually unearthed in the Alamogordo landfill. What’s more is that Atari E.T. cartridges, 99 of them to be exact, have gone up for sale on eBay and are already getting bids over $500, which is amazing. The unearthed Atari E.T. games are currently owned by Alamogordo’s Tularosa Basin Historical Society, which arranged for the excavation. The Atari E.T. cartridges you will find on eBay will ship with  certificates of authenticity, so you can be sure to get the actual worst video game of the world. The Atari E.T. cartridges have already received bids above $600 and the auction should end on November 13. The Society is also selling other games found in the Alamogordo landfill, such as Asteroids, Star Raiders, Warlords and Missile Commands. Microsoft has already made a documentary about Atari E.T. and the unearthing of the cartridges, including some details about how Atari fell in the 1980s. The documentary is the last production we will see from the Xbox Entertainment Studios, and it will air on November 0 with the Atari: Game Over title.