Back in 1983, Atari paid Steven Spielberg around $25 million for the rights to make a game based on his film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. They gave programmer Howard Scott Warshaw six weeks in which to finish the game in order to meet the holiday season, even though most games took about six months to develop. So confident were they in the demand for the game, they actually manufactured more game cartridges than there were consoles to play it on.

The demand was indeed strong. Unfortunately, the game itself wasn’t so strong, in fact some say it’s the worst game ever made (I disagree), and it’s especially strange considering his other titles – Yar’s Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark – are considered some of the best. Either way, the returns started coming fast and furious. Before they knew it, Atari had a massive amount of unsold cartridges and the urban legend was born that in the middle of the night, they trucked all those E.T. cartridges off to a landfill in the New Mexico desert, and didn’t just bury them but buried them under concrete. That couldn’t stop the game from heralding the great video-game industry crash of 1983.

Recently, a documentary produced by Xbox studios was filmed that followed investigators as they set out to dig up that landfill and determine once and for all whether or not the cartridges were actually there. It turns out they were, which I think we all knew, along with copies of Phoenix, Swordquest, Defender, Star Raiders, Centipede, and Warlords. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the documentary hosted by Howard Scott Warshaw at the recent Classic Gaming Expo here in Las Vegas, and it was fascinating. Here’s the preview for the documentary, and maybe it’s just me but I found the preview itself as interesting as the whole movie.

Some of the cartridges that were unearthed have already gone up on eBay, which surprises absolutely no one, but the prices might. Many of the games have some good bids, but the E.T. boxes that came out of the landfill are going for over $500! That’s a picture of one below.

Atari 2600 E.T. game from Almagordo landfill

I’m a collector of this stuff myself as you know, but I just don’t feel motivated to bid on these. We already saw the post on eBay lunacy, and while I understand these are a part of history – and they are – these prices are high, in my humble yet nonetheless correct opinion. I’m tempted, but not at those prices.