Some of those cartridges are probably working and I guess they will fetch quite alot on Ebay

Wow! Pretty cool story 😀

@vetz, Agreed. Considering that they are all new in their original plastic casing, the casing just may have kept the cartridges in tact. All depends on how many tonnes of dirt was dumped ontop of them though because they could also be little E.T Pancakes...

Here's another article with more details of what was found so far and pics of the dig.

http://readwrite.com/2014/04/28/atari-et-dig- … ~oCPKf1nPEBIshY

The stuff is 30 feet down, though, so it's not going to be easy to bring up everything that was dumped.

Here's the thing. Nothing produced by Atari themselves was actually considered to be rare. It is mostly third party stuff that didn't sell well when it was new that get the highest prices today so don't expect any thousand dollar carts to be dug up. If a lot of the carts they do find are still working and end up on the open market, then that will also depress prices even further. They'll probably find some clever way of packaging the stuff and labeling it as 'landfill find' kind of like what PCGS did when they recovered the coins from the vaults at the World Trade Center or from various shipwrecks to trick people into paying premium prices for otherwise common junk.

Hmm, I missed this story.

I bet the people at AtariAge must be freaking out. I remember they had a multi-dozen page argument thread about the whole subject.
The problem is that they could never specify what the legend actually is. The goalposts of "true" and "false" have never been well defined.

It's never been hard to believe that Atari disposed unsold merchandise, it was already documented that they took a tax writeoff for doing so. But the story that was widely told in the age of the internet was that they made a special trip just to bury millions of ET cartridges. That extreme characterization is what made the story get so much attention, and also made it harder to believe.

Naturally ET is in there, but plenty of other stuff as well. They buried a bunch of random unsold merchandise. It's cool that it's been dug up - uncovering all of that stuff from 30 years ago is interesting.. truly, not joking.
But honestly I think the find just brings the "legend" back down to a more mundane and real story. The meaning of the story is no longer that "ET sucked sooooo bad they had to bury it" but instead "Atari's sales were in a nosedive and they had to write off excess inventory of everything." This was already established history IMO, but still cool to see the landfill anyway.

sliderider wrote:

Here's the thing. Nothing produced by Atari themselves was actually considered to be rare. It is mostly third party stuff that didn't sell well when it was new that get the highest prices today so don't expect any thousand dollar carts to be dug up. If a lot of the carts they do find are still working and end up on the open market, then that will also depress prices even further. They'll probably find some clever way of packaging the stuff and labeling it as 'landfill find' kind of like what PCGS did when they recovered the coins from the vaults at the World Trade Center or from various shipwrecks to trick people into paying premium prices for otherwise common junk.

Actually, there could be quite a few rarities in that landfill. Some silver label Atari 2600 games are quite rare, like Quadrun, Swordquest : Waterworld, Rubik's Cube, Obelix and Gravitar. The Atari Children games are at least uncommon.

However, anyone can rough up a box and cart and sell it on ebay claiming it to have been unearthed from the Alamogordo landfill.

My psychic powers are unparallelled!
http://www.ebay.com/usr/tbhs575

Granted, the 'shortly' part seems to be debatable, but still.... 🤣

Some bidders are really insane 🤣

Great Hierophant wrote:

sliderider wrote:

Here's the thing. Nothing produced by Atari themselves was actually considered to be rare. It is mostly third party stuff that didn't sell well when it was new that get the highest prices today so don't expect any thousand dollar carts to be dug up. If a lot of the carts they do find are still working and end up on the open market, then that will also depress prices even further. They'll probably find some clever way of packaging the stuff and labeling it as 'landfill find' kind of like what PCGS did when they recovered the coins from the vaults at the World Trade Center or from various shipwrecks to trick people into paying premium prices for otherwise common junk.

Actually, there could be quite a few rarities in that landfill. Some silver label Atari 2600 games are quite rare, like Quadrun, Swordquest : Waterworld, Rubik's Cube, Obelix and Gravitar. The Atari Children games are at least uncommon.

However, anyone can rough up a box and cart and sell it on ebay claiming it to have been unearthed from the Alamogordo landfill.

Those silver label games would have been brand new at the time of the dump and some of them were only circulated through the Atari club, so not a lot of them would have been made anyway. It is doubtful anything like that would have ended up in the dump. It would have been the games that they made a million of that weren't selling that they would have dumped for a tax write off.

What's ironic is that after the big dump, Atari actually put many of the dumped games back into production.