New Mexico city working on who gets Atari games

Officials in a New Mexico city are working on a plan under which film companies, museums and the public could get Atari video games that were dug up from an old landfill last month.

An E.T. doll is seen while construction workers prepare to dig into a landfill in Alamogordo, N.M., Saturday, April 26, 2014. Producers of a documentary are digging in the landfill in search of millions of cartridges of the Atari ''E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial'' game that has been called the worst game in the history of videogaming. A New York Times article from 1983 reported that Atari cartridges of "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" were dumped in the landfill in Alamogordo.

Workers for a documentary film production company recovered the games from the garbage heap in Alamogordo.

According to the Alamogordo Daily News, city documents indicate Atari consoles and 1,377 games were found, including "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."

The search for the "E.T." cartridges will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early '80s. The game contributed to Atari's demise.

A draft plan being considered by Alamogordo officials would provide some of the games to the companies that paid for the excavation. Some would go to national, state and local museums, while hundreds could be sold to the public.