The legend of the buried Atari 2600 E.T. games now has a lucrative coda as online sales of the unearthed cartridges, plus several others recovered during a 2014 dig in New Mexico, reached nearly $108,000 in online auction sales.
The Alamogordo News reports that 881 of the recovered cartridges, a mix of the classic flop E.T. and a handful of other games like Missile Command, Defender, and Swordquest, have netted $107,930.15 via online auctions on eBay.
According to Tularosa Basin Historical Society Vice President Joe Lewandowski, the man that aided the excavation, the city of Alamagordo sold 881 games while sitting aside another 297 cartridges to sell later. Over 100 other games were distributed to museums and other vendors.
The games went up for sale online in November and netted plenty of cash right away. The first 100 cartridges brought in $37,000 for the city with the highest individual figure being a winning bid of $1,537 on one of the E.T. games.
Overall, per Lewandowski, the sales have netted $65,037.78 for the city of Alamogordo and $16,259.44 for the Tularosa Basin Historical Society. The rest of the money, just under $27,000, was used for expenses. There's no word on what the city plans to do with the money but Lewandowski hopes to present some ideas to the city.
The search for the games was the subject of a documentary, Atari: Game Over, that was released in November 2014. The film's director, Zak Penn, told Mashable at the time, "I really wanted to examine why people cared about Atari so much, and why E.T. was the whipping boy for everything that went wrong... I thought it would be 60 hipsters just sneering at this all ironically, but we got hundreds of people excited for the discovery."