Atari’s ‘E.T.’ game joins Smithsonian collection

WATCH ABOVE: Crews search a landfill for the discarded cartridges.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — One of the E.T. Atari game cartridges unearthed this year from a heap of garbage buried deep in the New Mexico desert has been added to the video game history collection at the Smithsonian.

READ MORE: Diggers find hundreds of decades-old Atari ‘E.T.’ games in landfill

Museum specialist Drew Robarge made the announcement Monday in a blog post.

He included a photograph of the crinkled game sitting next to an official cataloging number that was assigned to it by the city of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Officials have given every cartridge that was dug up from the community’s landfill its own certificate.

Robarge says the cartridge is one of the defining artifacts of the dark days of the early 1980s when the U.S. video game industry crashed.

READ MORE: Atari game cartridges dug up from New Mexico landfill hit pay dirt on eBay

Until now, he says that moment had not been represented in the museum’s collection.