The dusty town of Alamogordo in New Mexico has announced that in a series of eBay auctions, 881 of the early-1980s Atari video game cartridges that were buried for decades in the desert have sold for a grand total of $107,930.15.

Last April, a film crew and a dig crew hired by Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment Studios dug up an old garbage dump outside of Alamogordo, looking for Atari cartridges dumped in the fall of 1983. The dumping was precipitated by the North American Video Game Crash of 1983 and the total bomb of a game that was E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, which was written on a rush schedule and quickly gained a reputation among Atari players for being too punishing and complex. When Atari shut down its El Paso, Texas, factory that year, the company had a variety of its game cartridges—not just the E.T. ones—thrown out.

While a brief New York Times clip from that year confirmed that Atari had dumped the games, Atari itself never confirmed or denied the dump of tens or hundreds of thousands of its game cartridges. So naturally, rumors grew, with doubters and believers on each side, until the Atari E.T. dump became stuff of urban legend. But Joe Lewandowski, a garbage contractor in the Alamogordo area, remembered pieces of the event, and decades later he used some careful detective work to pinpoint just where in the vast desert the trove was buried (see the video below for a description of how Lewandowski found the dump location decades later).

A small sample of the cartridges was exhumed and used in the Xbox documentary. In September, the city of Alamogordo decided to sell hundreds of those cartridges on eBay, including Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pele's Soccer, Yar's Revenge, Baseball, Centipede, and Warlords.

Lewandowski went before the Alamogordo City Commissioners last week to report that the sales of the games raked in more than $100,000, $65,037.78 of which will go directly to the city of Alamogordo. Another $16,259.44 will go to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society. Shipping fees totaled more than $26,000 and were used to send the games to buyers around the US and in countries including Brazil, Austrailia, Singapore, France, and Canada.

In 2014, after a treasure trove of games is discovered in a New Mexico landfill, Ars speaks to Joe Lewandowski and Andrew Reinhard.

The most expensive sale was of an E.T. cartridge, which went for $1,535. Besides the cartridges that the city of Alamogordo took charge of, the filmmakers were able to keep 100 cartridges, and 23 cartridges were given away to museums.

Lewandowski says he's still holding on to 297 E.T. cartridges, according to the Alamogordo News. “I might sell those if a second movie comes out, but for now we're just holding them,” he said, adding that a reboot of E.T. the film could increase the value of the games for the city. (And, no kidding, at the rate Hollywood is going, it's not a crazy bet to make.)

In the meantime, the city commissioners, who approved the sale of the games unanimously last year, seem very pleased with the outcome. Lewandowski, too, said he had ideas about what to do with the money. "I would like to come back on September 22. I have some recommendations that I would like to present with the money," he told the commissioners, according to the Alamogordo Times. "The $65,000 is yours—you can do what you want with it, but I don't want to see it go to pot holes or sewer lines."