E.T. has finally found a home. A cartridge of Atari’s now-infamous 1980s video game, fresh from a New Mexico dump, has been added to the Smithsonian Institution’s collection.
The video game, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, was released in 1982, the same year as Steven Spielberg’s film, to poor sales and critical backlash. After the previously booming video game market crashed, Atari decided to bury the remaining cartridges in a landfill in New Mexico, not far from Roswell.
This spring, a documentary film crew dug up the landfill and found dusty, battered copies of the game. One of those cartridges will now join other artifacts in the Smithsonian’s collection, including the prototype for the first video game console and a Pong arcade cabinet.
The cartridge is not currently on display at the museum.