Atari eBay Auctions

Summary

Alamogordo ran eBay auctions on 44 separate days between November 13, 2014, and August 4, 2015, each day’s listings consisting of 1–96 individual lots. Each of the auctioned games came with a metal City of Alamogordo property tag and ID number as well as a certificate of authenticity signed by the mayor, Susie Galea, and by Howard Scott Warshaw, Atari wunderkind developer and creator of the E.T. game. Despite the variable conditions of the artifacts, the games served (and still serve) as a memento to three events: the mythologized, original dumping by Atari in 1983, the subsequent video game crash of the mid-1980s, and the 2014 excavation. The fact that actual archaeologists were on-hand gave further legitimacy and value to the finds. All of the auctioned games contained landfill dust stuck in the corners (and occasional evidence of the cement slurry poured over the top layer of games during the dumping), as well as the unmistakable stench of garbage, which can be used to authenticate games appearing on future auctions from private re-sellers.

At the conclusion of the final auction on August 4, 2015, Alamogordo netted a total of $104,333, selling 827 of the 1,324 excavated games. Some lots (boxed copies of E.T.) sold for a maximum of $1,537 to as little as $17 (loose copies of Defender) with an average selling price of $126 from the 7,452 bids received. Driven by the dump’s mythology, copies of E.T. garnered the highest total sales ($28,357 or 27% of the total sales), while several non-E.T. games netted only a single bid, often selling for less than $40.

This dataset contains the auctioned lots listed by eBay seller tbhs575 (Tularosa Basin Historical Society), organized chronologically from November 13, 2014, until August 4, 2015. Columns include the auction end-date, item ID, auction title, selling price, and total number of bids.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Atari Dump Site (Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA)

Keywords

Temporal Coverage

Calendar Date: 1983 to 1983 (Year of deposit by Atari, Inc.)

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contributor(s): Bret Weber; William Caraher

Field Director(s): Richard Rothaus

Lab Director(s): Raiford Guins

Principal Investigator(s): Joe Lewandowski

Project Director(s): Andrew Reinhard

Sponsor(s): Zak Penn

Notes

Rights & Attribution: All content provided on tDAR was used by permission of all associated with the project and is hereby committed to the public domain (CC0).

Source Collections

Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC, USA)

Tularosa Basin Historical Museum (Alamogordo, NM, USA)

The Strong National Museum of Play (Rochester, NY, USA)

Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation (Dearborn, Michigan, USA)

VIGAMUS - The Video Game Museum of Rome (Rome, Italy)

File Information

	Name	Size	Creation Date	Date Uploaded	Access
	Atari_eBay_Auctions.xlsx	136.00kb	Feb 16, 2016	Apr 15, 2021 6:40:40 AM	Public
	Excel spreadsheet prepared by eBay of all of the eBay auction listings created and managed by Joe Lewandowski, Tularosa Basic Historical Society.