Excavated E.T. Games Fetch Over £900 On Ebay

It must be strange having no history to dig up. Apparently jealous of Europe and Asia's vast array of ruins, museums and stolen ancient... stuff, a documentary crew in the US has gone Time Team on a New Mexico landfill. Their aim? To unearth a vast dump of video game cartridges - and now people are selling their rubbish finds for over £600.

With over 100 of the sand-filled, tattered copies of E.T. hitting eBay last week, nine managed to raise over £600, the highest earning a staggering £980. Widely perceived to be one of the worst video games ever made, the adaptation of Spielberg's classic for the Atari 2600 console performed so badly that it helped bring about the demise of Atari. In 1983, some 700,000 unsold copies of the game were unceremoniously buried in a large landfill in the New Mexico city of Alamogordo, birthing this somewhat fantastical video game legend. 

In April of this year, a film crew started excavating the rumoured site for an upcoming documentary, Atari: Game Over. Discoveries included a large number of E.T. games, defunct Atari consoles and other similarly ill-fated titles - several of which have now been sold with an accompanying ID tag from the dig site at Alamogordo and a photo narrative of the game's unfortunate history. 

You'll be able to find out the colourful history of E.T. and Atari when the documentary Atari: Game Over airs on Xbox Live on 20 November. Otherwise, keep your eyes peeled on eBay for another opportunity to buy a defunct copy of the worst video game ever made. Sorry, we mean 'history' - for your chance to buy history.  

(Image: Atari)

[Via: Joystiq]