Spoiler Alert! When Microsoft went digging in the desert this past April, they found the fabled resting place of thousands of Atari 2600 cartridges (including hundreds of copies of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial). Over the years, many people tried to pass off the mass burial as some kind of hoax or urban legend. But the truth was never really in doubt. Atari had trouble selling their games during the Christmas season of 1983 and trucked their unsold stock to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
So instead of focusing solely on the dig, Zak Penn’s documentary, Atari: Game Over, also looked into the culture of the company at the time and how the then biggest movie of all time could produce such a lousy tie-in game. This includes conversations with Atari executives, local politicians from the Alamogordo area, game historians, and the developer behind the infamous game, Howard Warshaw.
If you were in attendance at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, you had a chance to see the premiere screening of Atari: Game Over for yourself. The rest of us will have to wait until this Fall, when it debuts on Xbox Live as one of the first (and last) Xbox Entertainment Studios offerings. For now, we’ll have to content ourselves with the trailer embedded above.
