A New Mexico city commission agreed to allow a Canadian studio to search a landfill where old, terrible Atari games are rumoured to be buried.
Alamogordo commissioners decided last week they will allow Fuel Industries, a multimedia company, six months to search the landfill for games, according to The Alamogordo Daily News. The company has offices in Ontario and California.
One sought-after cartridge, the E.T. video game, is thought by some to be the worst video game of all time. Atari paid Steven Spielberg tens of millions of dollars to licence the wildly popular 1982 movie's name, and the dud of a game caused the troubled company's worth to sink even further at the time.
The game has since developed a cult following.
The rumoured Atari graveyard has long been a fascination of some who consider the commercial flop a part of video game history. It is believed that nine semi-trucks dumped the E.T. game and other Atari products in the southern New Mexico landfill in 1983.
Alamogordo Commissioner Jason Baldwin says he played the E.T. game and it was horrible. There are listings for the game on eBay that run from under a dollar to more than US$30.