This week the Alamagordo, New Mexico city council unanimously approved a tentative scheme to distribute roughly 1,500 Atari cartridges dug out of a local landfill earlier this year: roughly half will be sold to private collectors at auction, and the rest will be preserved for museum use. Dig site manager Joe Lewandowski seems to be the primary advocate for the plan, which will see 800 or so of the cartridges auctioned in lots on eBay in the coming weeks as a barometer to judge the public's interest in acquiring these specifically as relics of the dig. "The digging up of these games is a unique situation...no one has ever done anything like this before and no one will probably ever do anything like this again," Lewandowski told Polygon, pointing out that the E.T. Atari cartridges dug out of the landfill are conceivably more valuable to collectors than those dug out of a closet and sold on eBay for less than $10. The city's inventory of games and equipment unearthed during the dig will now be catalogued, cleaned, sealed and certified by workers at the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Anything not sold to collectors will be packaged into discrete collections that can be loaned out to museums worldwide. The Museum of Rome -- which maintains a section devoted to video game history -- has already expressed interest in such a collection.
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