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Now you can own a dirty piece of gaming history.
Remember that trove of discarded Atari games that was excavated from a dump in Alamogordo, New Mexico earlier this year? The Tularosa Basin Historical Society of Alamogordo has started selling some of them, including copies of the infamous Atari 2600 version of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, on eBay. Each game includes a certificate of authenticity.
About 100 games, including Atari 2600 hits like Centipede and Defender, are currently up for grabs. Auctions begin at between $50 and $100. Some of them have no bids at the moment, but the nicest copy ("nice" being a relative term) of E.T. is currently commanding more than $400. The auctions close November 13.
Atari discarded pallets containing thousands of games and pieces of computer equipment in 1983. Stores had begun returning the product, signaling the end of the Atari fad, but Atari was not equipped to refurbish or otherwise handle the returns. So it elected to throw them away, trucking them from its warehouse in El Paso, Texas to Alamogordo, which had promised to keep looters out of the landfill---something that had been a problem in El Paso.
Microsoft financed a documentary about the burial and subsequent excavation, Atari: Game Over, which members of Microsoft's Xbox Live can view on Xbox game consoles and online on November 20.
Savvy buyers may want to hold off on bidding just yet. The historical society's vice president, Joe Lewandowski---who was present when Atari buried the games in the landfill in 1983 and supervised the excavation effort in April---told the Alamogordo Daily News that once the 100 games currently listed on eBay are sold, the society plans to sell at least another 750 games and maybe another 800 after that. So there should be plenty more to go around.
