Excavated ET cartridges will be sold, distributed to museums
Remember when Xbox Entertainment Studios and Lightbox Entertainment spent a weekend digging up a bunch of Atari cartridges from a landfill? Both studios may have gotten the documentary footage they were looking for, but what do you do with the cartridges after the joy of proving an urban tale fades? In the case of Alamogordo, the town that has jurisdiction over said landfill, you sell more than half of them.
Reuters reports that the Alamogordo City Council voted 7-0 on Tuesday to sell around 800 of the 1,300 excavated games, with listings to be hosted on eBay and the council's website. The haul includes hundreds of copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the keystone of Atari's video game burial story. Joe Lewandowski, who served as dig site supervisor when Microsoft, Lightbox and a small crowd watched excavators dig up trash in the desert, told Retuers that sales should begin in two weeks and wrap by Christmas.
As for the 500 other cartridges, the City of Alamogordo intends to keep some as mementos, with the rest being donated to museums worldwide. You know what they say: One city's trash is another museum's piece of video game history.
[Image: Microsoft]
