Long-buried "E.T." game heading to eBay

One of the most fascinating legends in video gaming is soon coming to eBay (EBAY), giving anyone a chance to buy a piece of history.

For decades, video gamers wondered if Atari truly did bury millions of copies of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," a widely reviled game that some considered the worst ever made. The games were buried in New Mexico, it was rumored, just waiting to be unearthed.

Their questions were answered earlier this year, when a team of archaeologists, filmmakers and gamers convened at the Alamogordo landfill in New Mexico to dig for the titles. Armed with excavators and hard hats, the team turned up 1,300 vintage video games, many in fairly good condition.

For video game fans, it was an extraordinary discovery. The games were buried in 1983 after being rushed out to accompany the release of Steven Spielberg's science fiction film of the same name. While the movie was a hit, the game, made for the Atari 2600 console, flopped.

James Heller, who worked for Atari in 1983, told an Idaho television station that he was charged with getting rid of 750,000 games that had been sitting in a warehouse in El Paso, Texas. He said he deposited the games in the New Mexico landfill, and after seeing local kids raid the stash, he decided to dump six truckloads of cement on top to make sure they were never found again.

But they were -- a small number of them, at least. A few hundred copies of the game reportedly went to Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment Studios, which are developing a documentary about the discovery. Some copies went to museums that had requested them. The rest went to the city of Alamogordo, the owner of the landfill.

This month, the Alamogordo City Council voted unanimously to sell about 800 of the games on eBay and on the city's own website. The games are expected to go on sale sometime over the next two weeks, and no one knows how much they will end up selling for.

"It could be either worth 50 bucks apiece or be worth 5 bucks apiece," Joe Lewandowski, one of the organizers of the dig, told CBS News. "We don't know. The market will determine that."

Each game will have a certificate of authenticity, an ID tag and a serial number. That's how you know it's real, Lewandowski said. "If somebody is trying to sell you a game that doesn't have that and says that's from the Atari dig, it's probably one they stuck out on the driveway and drove over it and said here you go," he added.