Atari: Game Over
How do you go from the fastest growing company in American history to a heavily indebted, disintegrating empire in less than a decade?
With the release of Pong in the late ’70s, Atari took a firm grip on the video game market and nearly monopolized the industry, delivering one influential bestseller after another. They embody the American success story through innovation, hard work, and the production of a range of outstanding cutting-edge products that appeal to the masses. But by the mid-1980s, the video game giant was no more. What went wrong?
The incredibly entertaining new documentary Atari: Game Over features a theory shared by countless video game geeks around the world. Anticipating the massive response to Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film ET: The Extra-Terrestrial before its initial release, Atari programmer Howard Warshaw was tasked with creating a video game connection within five weeks. The project was a huge undertaking for Warsaw and an investment of tens of millions of dollars for the company. The game’s eventual release caused a deafening sensation, failing to ignite what had long been seen as the beginning of the end of what was called Atari.
Whether plausible or not, the story has spawned some urban legends among gamers over the years, with rumors that Atari dumped hundreds of video games in a New Mexico landfill after going out of business, including the fate of many returned. The ill-fated ET title.
Atari: Game Over divides attention between the story of the company itself, as told by those who witnessed its meteoric rise and fall, and the ambitious digging of the landfill where a valuable piece of nerdy history is said to be buried.
The tone of the film is one of warm and playful nostalgia, but also with an underlying melancholy. For onlookers standing on the edge of the landfill waiting to hear whether the precious loot was found, the excavation meant more than the demise of the beloved enterprise; it seemed to mark the end of her innocent youth.
