Washington: Hundreds of copies of a videogame described as the 'world's worst' are now being auctioned after they were unearthed from a landfill site in the US.
The vintage video-game called 'ET the Extra-Terrestrial', based on a hit movie and released in 1982, was said to be so bad that Atari games buried a million unsold copies at a New Mexico rubbish dump. As many as 1,300 copies of the video game were uncovered in a major dig in April this year, proving that the story was true, and not just an urban myth, 'Sky News' reported. Now more than half of the vintage video game haul is to be auctioned.
According to the dig site supervisor, Joe Lewandowski, the excavation was like seeing a "phoenix rising from the desert". "It was like the beginning, end, and a new beginning for the video game industry when we found these games," he said.
The games are stored at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, 321km southeast of Albuquerque. The city plans to keep some of the games as mementos, and
the rest of the cartridges will be donated to museums around the world.
The sale is due to begin in two weeks and will be complete by Christmas. The video game flopped after being rushed out to coincide with the release of the Steven Spielberg movie, and contributed to collapse of the video game industry in its early years, the report said.
