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Unearthed E.T. Atari Game Cartridges Score $108K At Auction
MojoKid writes: Hundreds of Atari 2600 cartridges of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial that were excavated last year from a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico collectively raked in nearly $108,000 through eBay auctions. Some $65,000 of that will go to the city of Alamogordo, while the Tularosa Basin Historical Society will receive over $16,000. Over $26,600 went to shipping fees and other expenses. A team of excavators led by operational consultant Joe Lewandowski unearthed the E.T. cartridges in front of a film crew. The high profile (among gaming historians) dig was the basis a documentary called Atari: Game Over, which is available for free through the Microsoft Store.
They're moving in to a new (to them) building and probably could use the funds.
I'm a local, unfortunately I was out of town when the dig happened, otherwise I would've been there doing some photography and laughing.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
How ironic
Funny, people have been talking about excavating those cartridges for at least 15+ years.
... was the basis a documentary called Atari: Game Over, which is available for free through the Microsoft Store.
It's also on Netflix, for those that don't know what the Microsoft Store is or even want to know what the Microsoft Store is.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. Though if they actually try playing the game they might rebury the whole lot.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
They trashed that game because it didn't sell. It didn't sell because it was a shit game. Games do not get better with age.
Not much of a piece. City is the winner here.
It looks like they unearthed around 1,200 cartridges. Does that mean there isn't any truth to the legend that hundreds of thousands were buried, or is that all they bothered to locate and excavate? After all, if they dug up 100,000+ cartridges, they would flood their own market and they wouldn't sell for as much on ebay, etc.
Better known as 318230.
Not such a failure NOW, huh, Atari?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
By the time you include the cost of excavation, the cost of shipping, and all the labor involved from the research, getting permission, filming it, etc... then $108k is peanuts and likely doesn't even cover a fraction of the costs. My guess is that they would be deeply in the red if it wasn't for the film but they have likely made considerably more than the $108k by selling rights to the film.
I recently excavated several Atari cartridges from my closet. I think there's 2 or 3 ETs there and up to a dozen Combat. Offering $100 each for them.
free !== free from those sources.
$108,000 / 900 = $120 per cartridge
Assuming $40 price in 1982, after inflation, that is $98.92, so an "investor" would profit about $20 per. That doesn't account for shipping, and assuming his mom let him store them in the basement for free next to his bed.
Of course you could buy them for a dollar a pound soon after release.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't care how much they paid for them. The game still sucks!
Failure is making more cartridges than available consoles
Y'know, in case you want to play the game more than once?
As a former financial analyst I could probably name 100 innovations in Excel alone.
As a current accountant I can safely state that very Excel has barely improved in the last 10 years in meaningful ways. Sure there are some incremental improvements and it's gotten a bit more polished but nothing earth shaking. Probably the most useful thing added in recent years to my mind is conditional formatting which we saw back in 2007 if memory serves. Some added functions here, a few graphing improvements there, etc. Excel is a fine program but it hasn't been particularly innovative in quite a long time.
"Atari: Game Over, which is available for free through the Microsoft Store."
I don't even know what the MS store is. Is that some Win8 App thing? Seriously I've never heard that MS had a store. Anyway, watch it on Netflix.
List five firms that have made a greater contribution than Microsoft to the specific task of getting a personal computer on every desk.
I can think of three you could make a solid argument for. IBM, Apple and Intel. Microsoft would certainly fall somewhere in the top 5 though. Exactly where is an exercise for the reader.
What was available in the '90s that was ruined by Microsoft?
Web standards and web browsers is probably the best example. Third party OEM operating system installation though restrictive licensing agreements. Security - macro viruses in particular. DRM facilitation.
What was available last decade that was ruined by Microsoft?
Nokia comes to mind... The Windows interface also.
"The only sane reason I could see to dig the things up is so that they could be properly recycled..."
The "sane" reason for digging them up is that they were apparently worth $108,000 at auction. Very sane.
As far as a sane reason for buying one, I'm at a loss. Nostalgia?
As a power Excel user, you'd be a great person to create/reference an Excel/Google spreadsheet/Libreoffice Calc/others comparison table...
Such lists can be misleading. For example both LibreOffice and Excel have decent pivot table functionality but there are some quirks to each. Hard to explain the differences briefly in a table. Little things can sometimes make a big difference in which you might choose. For example I used LibreOffice Base to tie into an old database for some spreadsheets at my company. Access couldn't connect for some obscure technical reason.
Here is the Cliff Notes version:
Excel is probably the best overall but LibreOffice is good enough for most people unless everyone you work with is using Excel. The extra features and polish in Excel won't matter for 95% of the users out there. If you really use stuff like VBA heavily then it's probably ok to fork over the money for Excel. If you aren't tied to Excel by a userbase or specific feature need then go with LibreOffice. It's pretty easy to migrate to Excel if you have the need down the line in most cases. LibreOffice obviously is the easy choice if you use Linux. My company for example standardized on LibreOffice and it's been fine for our needs. There are other spreadsheets out there but unless one has a very specific feature need it would be hard to justify using them. For example Apple's Numbers spreadsheet is ok but it lacks some features and nobody really uses it so it's only really useful for personal projects.
The cloud versions (Google, MS, etc) are fine for simple projects and collaborations but if you have hard core number crunching to do or need pretty formatting or need to integrate with other office suite software then you'll usually go with Excel or LibreOffice. I expect the cloud versions will get better in time but they aren't there yet. Excel has better cloud integration than LibreOffice if that matters to you but neither integrates super well with Google's offerings.
If they really wanted to get rid of them, they would have rented a storage building, then defaulted on it.