Those Exhumed E.T. Games Are For Sale on eBay

Just as the real-life movie character E.T. came back to life after being left for dead (and turning all white), the E.T. Atari game is experiencing life again after having been literally buried for decades. Dug-up copies of E.T. are for sale on eBay, and fetching an unbelievably high price for a game only famous for being so terrible.

Tales of E.T. the game's incredible shittiness turned it into something of a legend. The game was so bad that it killed Atari, nearly killed home video games, and had to be buried in the desert. Not only was the game's exhumation deemed a documentary-worthy event, it has resulted in one of the strangest municipal revenue streams imaginable.

According to Alamogordo News, the city of Alamogordo is going to sell "a limited number" of the games that were buried in the Alamogordo Landfill in 1983:

Tularosa Historical Society Vice President Joe Lewandowski said they're selling the first 100 cartridges on Ebay just to get an idea of about how much they'll be going for and then they will sell another 750, and possibly 800 more. "We don't have an idea of how much they're going to be. No one has ever done this before, and after this no one is ever going to do it again," said Lewandowski.

The sale includes games beyond E.T. There are also good games like Asteroids, Missile Command, Warlords, Defender, Star Raiders, Swordquest, Phoenix, Centipede. The winning bidder gets the game and also a certificate of authenticity, which is good because they're obviously being bought as collector's items, rather than for playing. (I'm not only sure of this because the cartridges are covered in 30 years worth of dirt and I don't know anyone who has a functional Atari, but the most damning evidence is that E.T. is fetching way way more than the other titles—around $300 while the rest hover between $50-100.)

If anything, tales of the game's shittiness have probably been understated. Here, go ahead and play it on the Internet Archive. That's a privilege no one should have to pay for at all. To quote another cautionary tale of the undead from the 1980s, "sometimes dead is better."