NM city plans to auction excavated vintage video games

[dixiegrrrrl]

At first I thought WTF
but THEN I wanted to grab a shovel and head to our landfill..

ALBUQUERQUE N.M. (Reuters) - A city in New Mexico where 1,300 unwanted vintage video games were discovered buried in a landfill has voted to auction off more than half of the cartridges in the run-up to Christmas.

Members of the Alamogordo City Council voted 7-0 late on Tuesday to offer some 800 of the Atari games found earlier this year for sale on eBay and the council's own website.

Snip......The find included hundreds of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" cartridges, considered by some the worst video game ever made.
It flopped after being rushed out to coincide with the release of Steven Spielberg's 1982 hit movie, and it contributed to a collapse of the video game industry in its early years.
Atari is believed to have been saddled with most of the 5 million E.T. cartridges produced. The New York Times reported at the time that the game manufacturer buried the games in the New Mexico desert in the middle of the night.

http://af.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idAFKBN0H526A20140910?sp=true

[L0oniX]

1. Most of them are emulated for other OS platforms anyway.

[roamer65]

3. ...and the emulations are better than the originals in many cases.

Tempest on my iPad is much better than the old coin op game. The poor fire button took such a beating on that game. Now it hit it as much as I want with no mechanical degradation.

[hunter]

2. Believe it or not, this game has fans, and the worst aspects of it have been patched...

Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600

If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently, I'm not alone.

On this page I'm going to briefly explore why people hate E.T., and how the game can be fixed.

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et

These games dug up from the landfill are an interesting cultural artifact.