After months of anticipation, the Atari game cartridges unearthed in a New Mexico landfill finally went up for auction on Ebay. The top-selling item was one of the famously-abandoned cartridges for the laughably bad E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, which sold for a whopping $1,537. The winning bid beat out 41 other nostalgic-people-with-too-much money. From Joystiq:
A total of nine ET cartridges sold for more than $1,000 apiece, with copies of Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command and others pulling in hundreds of dollars each in additional auctions.
The only reason everyone wants a piece of this momentous find is the nostalgia. Not only will these cartridges no longer work, but many (like E.T.) are just plain terrible. Phil Wiswell of Video Games warned readers E.T. for Atari was “really for kids (the littler ones).” Not so much because infant game players would find it enjoyable, but because they lacked the mental capacity to realize just how sh*tty it truly was.
Organizers provided buyers with certificates of authenticity. You know, so they could justify shelling out thousands of dollars for an old, unusable game hated for its impossibly difficult design back in 1983.