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Some Atari cartridges that were unearthed in Alamogordo are to be auctioned off on Ebay.
Scads of Atari cartridges were discovered in the Alamogordo landfill. The people will be able to purchase many of them since they ar up for sale. Among them are the notorious E.T The Extra-Terrestrial. The auctioning took place through Ebay. The paraphernalia having to do with Atari got interred in the landfill 31 years ago.
The city elders made the choice of selling off a few of the samples to the ordinary people. At first a hundred will get sold on Ebay and later on 750 and maybe even 800. There is great demand for the game cartridges.
“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 Joe Lewandowski, Tularosa Historical Society Vice President. “We’re selling them on Ebay because it’s the best thing to hit worldwide and this is a worldwide phenomenon. I got people from England, Spain, Italy, Thailand, and basically places all over the world asking for them.”
The games come in over nine titles which include:
- Asteroids,
- Missile Command,
- Warlords,
- Defender,
- Star Raiders,
- Swordquest,
- Phoenix,
- Centipede and
- the inimitable E.T.
These games /4/not be functional since they have been exhumed from tons of soil and rubbish. The games were sold on Ebay under the title of Atari Dig Cartridges. They will carry ID tags to ensure that everyone remembers that they came from the landfill site.
There are still thousands of other cartridges buried beneath the earth at the site. It will be some time before they get unearthed too. Millions of such games have been buried in various spots all over the country.
“It took so long to dig the games up because I didn’t know people were interested in it. Over the years people would ask me about it because they knew I was from Alamogordo. I never thought anything of it until the Discovery Channel called and they started asking about it,” said Lewandowski.
“There was another movie company that called and a professor from New York University who was writing a book also called about it too. That’s when I got online and looked up Atari dump. There was million of hits. I was shocked, I thought there could be a real story here.”
The demand for the games was an unexpected thing and so it had to be fulfilled. And the worst of the games was E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. There are those who believe that it was because of this particular game that the decline of Atari took place.
But others contend that it was in fact the reaching of limits as far as market space was concerned that caused the downfall of the famous gaming series of the 80s. Atari was one of first video game consoles and it came in that greedy and successful decade that was the 1980s.
This of course was the age of Pepsi, Michael Jackson and the Challenger Space Shuttle Debacle. Such pop phenomena as Madonna, Martika and Tiffany were tearing up the airwaves. It was in the midst of other computer gimmicks such as Commodore 64 and Texas Instruments that Atari came and ruled the roost for awhile.
It was the game “Space Invaders” that really made Atari a household name. Soon everyone was handling their joysticks in conjunction with the game. Today it is a part of history yet the nostalgia to get a glimpse of the 80s remains.
Source: Alamogordo News