Unearthed E.T. Atari Game Cartridges Score $108K At Auction 62
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.
At least the historical society is getting a piece (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Not much of a piece. City is the winner here.
available for free through the Microsoft Store. (Score:2)
How ironic
Re: (Score:3)
How ironic
Sure, but what people get with this physical game cartridge is a really great story to go with their game.
Priceless.
Re:Waste of money (Score:4, Insightful)
"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?
Re: (Score:1)
Just wait until the high profile dig to unearth the millions of buried Windows ME diskettes. It'll be the basis a documentary called "Microsoft: WTF?!?", which will be available for free through the Google Store
ha (Score:4, Funny)
Documentary on Netflix (Score:5, Informative)
... 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.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Microsoft actually contributed toward the modern PC landscape
By shitting all over it. I'm about to make a 'contribution' right now, excuse me.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh please, absolutely massive contributions to modern computing and the web.
Massive contributions of malware, you mean.
Name one, seriously name just one massive contribution to modern computing, brought to us by Microsoft, and I'll show you where they bought it.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Documentary on Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
+1000
That was the start of AJAX and sophisticated asynchronous web applications. Without it we'd still be stuck with get and post.
Actually if you want to speak of what Microsoft has done for the web...
During the DOJ investigation, it was found out (by subpoenaing internal Microsoft memos) that the whole reason Microsoft created Internet Explorer was because they perceived the web as being a threat to Windows. That is, when they saw the rise of Netscape, they noticed how developers could write web applications and plugins for the browser, which ran on any platform, so developers were now free to target Netscape instead of their cash cow.
Microsoft was having none of that, so they explicitly designed IE to break the more advanced web standards, as well as introducing activex, so that if IE reached critical mass (say, over 70% of users) then they could render the web to become something that permanently belongs to Windows. After Windows 98 achieved that (by including it built in, which saved download time for dialup users, which were the vast majority at the time) then the world was stuck with IE5 and IE6 for about 7 years, which fully neglected to implement new web standards, and barely even supported HTML4.
So in other words, Microsoft deliberately held back web development for 7 years.
Meanwhile, guess what happened when AJAX did finally come around? Microsoft saw their freemail dominance in purchased hotmail fall flat on its face, as gmail's web interface was even faster than the copy of Outlook that most people ran natively on their desktop (the gig of email space was just to get people in, but the webUI was the real innovation there, which unlike hotmail, didn't require a full page reload every time you clicked anything.) Microsoft also saw Google maps completely wipe out their sales of MapPoint and Streets & Trips.
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile, guess what happened when AJAX did finally come around? Microsoft saw their freemail dominance in purchased hotmail fall flat on its face, as gmail's web interface was even faster than the copy of Outlook that most people ran natively on their desktop (the gig of email space was just to get people in, but the webUI was the real innovation there, which unlike hotmail, didn't require a full page reload every time you clicked anything.)
You mean the AJAX web client that google copied from Microsoft's Exchange Web Client that was released 7 years prior to gmail (1997 vs 2004)?
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, Microsoft's Exchange Web Client was in beta in 1995, and released in 1997. Gmail was in beta in 2004, and released in 2009. Pick between them, either a 9 year lead, or 12 year lead. In either case, google had no "innovation" and just copied what Microsoft originally did.
Other contributions that come to mind are wide spread adoption of TCP Offload, Selective ACK, Window Scaling on the OS side. There are a number of other great improvements that they may not have invented, but brought mainstream...
Re: (Score:1)
Oh, you mean LiveScript 2.0? They didn't buy it from someone, they just copied someone else. I'll give you half of that one. If you can come up with another half you'll really have something. But you're just engaging in typical Microsoft-fanboy revisionism; it was Netscape's LiveScript that actually made dynamic webpages possible. Creating Xmlhttprequest was Microsoft's way of attacking Netscape.
Re: (Score:2)
(Named)
Named something that was a copy of something which was already relevant when it was created. If that's the best you can do, you've only proven my point. The very best they can do is imitate, and you're lapping it up. Easy to see why you're too cowardly to log in.
Re: Documentary on Netflix (Score:4, Interesting)
As a former financial analyst I could probably name 100 innovations in Excel alone.
Don't feed the idiot trolls. Microsoft = Bad is all they know.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
As a former financial analyst I could probably name 100 innovations in Excel alone.
Then we could see how many of those 100 innovations actually existed in earlier products from competitors, except I'm not going to do that much research. Spreadsheets are not exactly new technology.
Don't feed the idiot trolls. Microsoft = Bad is all they know.
I'm running Windows 7 right now. But there's nothing innovative about it. I'm not running it because it was full of fresh ideas. I'm running it because that's where the software I want to run can be successfully executed.
I'm slowly getting the idea that most of you don't have very broad OS experience, and that's
Re: (Score:1)
"Spreadsheets are not exactly new technology."
Troll move goalpost. Troll don't want to lose.
Excel "innovations" (Score:1)
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 l
Re: (Score:2)
As a power Excel user, you'd be a great person to create/reference an Excel/Google spreadsheet/Libreoffice Calc/others comparison table, grouped and/or sorted by the more useful spreadsheet functions. It would help people discover the more useful functionality and avoid the fluff and distractions added in recent years.
Comparing spreadsheets (Score:2)
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 LibreO
Re: (Score:1)
I realise this is the tried-and-tested /. theme, but who from the '80s onward would you say has the greatest responsibility for enabling serious computing for the masses? List five firms that have made a greater contribution than Microsoft to the specific task of getting a personal computer on every desk.
Or, to tackle your "shitting all over it", what was available in 1981 that was ruined by Microsoft? What was available in the '90s that was ruined by Microsoft? What was available last decade that was ruine
Microsoft (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
It may be free, but you have to sell your soul to get a Microsoft Account. Or at least get a fake email account.
Re: (Score:2)
Frankly I thought they were making a statement about the game itself by only releasing it on the Microsoft Store.
Re: (Score:2)
It probably is the best game on the Microsoft Store.
One man's trash... (Score:5, Funny)
One man's trash is another man's treasure. Though if they actually try playing the game they might rebury the whole lot.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the Atari 400/800/XL/XE games were MUCH better than the 2600 everyone remembers. The Atari ST games were great as well. The 2600 was a piece of crap.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not a bad game at all. With a few tweeks, [neocomputer.org] it's even better.
1,200 found (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
...they would flood their own market and they wouldn't sell for as much on ebay, etc.
What a hilariously fitting end that would be for one of the games credited with crashing the video game market.
Re: (Score:2)
Atari also had the 400/800 computers and the 5200 in that timeframe which were much better than the 2600. The Atari 400/800/XL/XE was nearly twice as fast as the C64 with a much larger color palette and better I/O. C64 had better hardware sprites though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There is truth that maybe 100,000 or so were buried there. They were unsold copies and returns. Alongside that though, they found an equal mix of other games, including pong, space inva
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It gets its rap fro several reasons, being one of the last released games that Atari released.
Are you smoking crack? Atari had the 7800 after that, the XE Game System, the Lynx and the Jaguar. Atari also had 2 relatively successful lines of computers as well that sold until the early 90's.
Atari was bought by Tramiel in '84 and some aspects of quality declined but they were still alive and kickin'.
E.T. phone home, tell them that HE'S RICH BITCH! (Score:2)
Not such a failure NOW, huh, Atari?
180k isn't very much for the effort involved. (Score:2)
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 wonder how much mine are worth (Score:1)
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.
$57 for Zaxxon, yikes! (Score:1)
$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.
I don't care how much they paid for them... (Score:2)
I don't care how much they paid for them. The game still sucks!
what even is that? (Score:1)
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.