'Worst Video Game Ever' Unearthed From Landfill; Sells for $100K

Those Atari games dug up from a New Mexico landfill have sold for more than $100,000.

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Complex Original

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Atari ruled the video game world in the 1980s. That is until the colossal failure of what is widely considered to be the "worst video game of all time" – E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

The game cost a ton of money and was produced in just over a month. It bombed so hard that some say it brought down the whole company. Otherwise we might be playing an Atari today instead of PS4 and Xbox One.

There's even a whole documentary about it on Netflix.

For more than 30  years, an urban legend persisted that Atari was forced to bury thousands of E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. It was a legend until it turned out to be true last year when filmmaker Joe Lewandowski led a crew that unearthed the long-lost games in that landfill. 

So why spend all this time and money to dig up some old trash from the '80s? Money, of course. 

The Associated Press reports that 800 of the cartridges dug up from that Alamogordo landfill have sold for more than $108,000 on eBay, with people buying them from all over the world. Some of the carts that weren't sold have been placed in the Smithsonian.

Would you pay more than $100 for a horrible game for an outdated system that spent the last three decades underground next to a decomposing baby diaper? Turns out a lot of people would. 

 

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