14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the excavation efforts that Microsoft has launched in the desert in order to find E.T. cartridges has been so successful that some of them will be put up for sale in order to give fans a chance to acquire a piece of gaming world history.
A documentary about the process and the way the game is emblematic of the industry crash of the ‘80s will be broadcast soon on the Xbox One home console.
The Alamogordo City Commission says that 700 of the cartridges that have been dug up will be offered for those interested inside the New Mexico Museum of Space History, although a price has not yet been established.
Another 100 of them will be offered to Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment, the production companies that have created the Xbox One documentary, and other local museums will also get smaller numbers.
Susie Galea, the mayor of the city, is quoted by Polygon as saying that, “We have been working with the space museum for curation, both for displaying and selling the games; they are now artefacts. The City Commission acted on Tuesday to give 100 of the games to Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment. There are 700 that we can sell that we can sell.”
Apparently, certificates of authenticity will be attached to the E.T. video games and some of them might be sold online.
More than 700,000 other video games are buried in the landfill that was excavated for the Xbox One documentary and the entire site might be turned into a tourist attraction in the coming years.
The mayor adds, “The dig was a lot deeper, a lot more than they thought they would have to go, They thought it was going to be 18 feet down and it was 30 instead.”
The Xbox One is set to get a variety of original programming starting this month, designed to show off the multimedia capabilities of the device and attract a wider number of users.
The Microsoft-made next-gen console is also dropping its price to 399 dollars or Euro as the Kinect motion tracking system is getting eliminated from the retail box.
The company has promised a number of big reveals during the upcoming E3 2014 event and fans are eagerly waiting to hear more about the new Halo title and the two TV series that are associated with it, which are set to be launched in 2015.