The phrase "one man's trash is another man's treasure" isn't often true in a literal sense, but it was this week as the City of Alamogordo, New Mexico raised nearly $36,500 by auctioning off the first set of nearly 100 cartridges dug up from their infamous 1983 Atari dumping

While many different Atari 2600 games were represented in the city's eBay auctions, the E.T. cartridges that were central to the dumping's "urban legend" were—unsurprisingly—the most popular. The eight crumpled-but-still-complete-in-box copies of the game, which many have dubbed the worst in history, sold for a median of $1,400, with one copy topping $1,537 when the auction concluded after 42 bids last night. Even the 11 unboxed E.T. cartridges dug up from the dirt fetched a hefty median price of $635. The minimum price to own a trashed copy of one of the biggest flops in gaming history? $511.

The 78 non-E.T. cartridges being auctioned in this first batch weren't nearly so in-demand, but they still got an average price of $227, which is pretty good for literal trash that's been sitting in the ground for over 30 years. One boxed copy of Asteroids went for $490, while the absolute lowest price to own a piece of Atari landfill history so far was $157.50 for a copy of Missile Command.

Don't fret if you missed your chance to purchase decades-old trash this time around; the city says it plans to auction 700-800 more of the 1,300 cartridges that were actually dug up (the remainder will go to the film crew behind the Atari: Game Over documentary and to various museums). Maybe we'll see Nintendo World Championship-style price inflation on those follow-up auctions—or maybe the market of people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for historic cartridges has already been somewhat saturated in this first round.