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Atari Games Dug Up In Landfill Sell For $100k

Hundreds of Atari game cartridges dug up in a New Mexico landfill last year have generated more than $100,000 (£65,000) in sales over the last several months.

The cache of 881 games were sold on eBay, with buyers coming from 45 US states and more than a dozen countries worldwide.

The result of the sale - $108,000 (£70,000) in total - was announced by Joe Lewandowski, who dug up the Atari games in April last year.

The games had been buried for more than 30 years in a landfill in the New Mexico city of Alamogordo.

Among them was ET The Extraterrestrial, a game based on Steven Spielberg's movie which is regarded as the worst video game ever created.

ET the video game was released in 1982 after only 34 days of development. It did not live up to its financial expectations and is considered by many to have contributed to Atari's demise.

An Atari ET game cartridge still in its original box sold for $1,537 (£981) on eBay.

There were more than 60 other titles in the cache, Mr Lewandowski said, including Asteroids, Missile Command, Warlords, Defender, Star Raiders, Swordquest, Phoenix, Centipede and Super Breakout.

Mr Lewandowski said there are hundreds more cartridges that did not go for sale this time but might be sold at a later stage.

"There's 297 we're still holding in an archive that we'll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them," he said.

"But for now we're just holding them."

Twenty-three games also made their way to museums around the world, including the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Deutsches Film Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.

The city will receive about $65,000 (£42,000) from the sale of the games.

The mystery behind why the games were dumped in the landfill inspired a documentary film by Microsoft Corp's Xbox Entertainment Studios.