Comic-Con: Nerdom's Greatest Urban Legend Solved in 'Atari: Game Over'
A little-noticed documentary named Atari: Game Over premiered at Comic-Com last night. The ultimate nerd story about a long-lost video game from the 1980s, it provided an in-depth look at some real-life intrigue that a legion of supervillains would find hard pressed to match.
Atari: Game Over is the first documentary produced by Xbox Live’s Entertainment arm and is set to debut this fall on the console. The film was directed by Hollywood screenwriter Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand, PCU) who had previously tried his hand at the documentary genre with the satirical Incident at Loch Ness.
The tale unravels an urban legend that sits at the core of video game history. The myth goes something like this: By the early 1980s, Atari had become one of the fastest growing companies in American history. At its core were a group of eccentric game designers who for nearly a decade thrilled young people with their breathtakingly imaginative inventions. At the center of that group, was Howard Warshaw, creator of Atari’s mega-hit Yars’ Revenge, among other titles.
In 1982, the company released to enormous hype a videogame tie-in with Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. The game was an enormous flop for Atari and would go down in lore as one of the worst videogames in history. So great was the E.T.-created disaster, that it was long blamed for the company’s financial fall and with the end of gaming’s first great creative era. Warshaw’s brilliant career came to an undignified end.
That legend became settled history, but it is the tale’s denouement that sparked decades of speculation. After millions of E.T. cartridges were returned, Atari had a huge plastic load of embarrassment on its hands. The parent company Warner Bros. buried the leftover games in a New Mexico desert landfill. And from there, down through the years, a tale has grown about the poor misunderstood E.T. games lying somewhere beneath the sands.
Penn’s documentary retraces this history and tries to clear up the mystery of the lost cartridges. He connects with Joe Lewandowski, a “garbage nerd” living in Alamogordo, New Mexico — home of the supposed burial ground — who after years of painstaking work, seems to have confirmed the tale and pinpointed the spot on the desert floor beneath which he believes E.T. lies. The problem is that you can’t just get a shovel and dig in the sand. The dump is made up of hundreds of concrete bunkers, each buried 20 feet deep. No records were kept of what was buried where and many bunkers contain toxic waste.
All this must be sorted through by Penn’s team before they can bring in the giant earth-moving machines for what by this point has become a hunt for nerdom’s Lost Ark (a comparison not missed by the filmmakers). While unraveling the mystery, Penn takes viewers through Atari’s meteoric rise and fall, debunking a lot of the original legend. (E.T.: The Game, it turns out, had little to do with the end of Atari, a company that was in desperate financial straits for unrelated reasons.) For survivors of the era, his evocation of the initial delight at playing an Atari game will be moving. And Penn also offers a fascinating look at the gonzo culture that drove Atari, complete with naked engineers, desk-adjacent hot tubs, and heavy office drug use.
He also interviews many of the people who were involved with Atari and the E.T. game in particular, from the fans — including author Ernest Cline who drives his DeLorean to the dig site — to gaming historians to Warshaw himself, now a psychotherapist treating programmers in Silicon Valley and who ultimately comes to the dig. (We won’t spoil how the hunt turns out, but those who want to know can click here.)
Video game designer Howard Warshaw (left with spouse) and Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell (right with spouse) at the Comic-Con screening
After the screening, Penn revealed that he got involved in the documentary on a lark, thinking the urban legend would make satirical fodder for a film in the vein of his Loch Ness piece. But he began to take the mission seriously after meeting so many people who were touched by the game, and who passionately argued what this period meant. (Among other things, Atari was the first consumer-oriented computer system and introduced the notion of programming to a generation that would go on to create the products we rely on today.)
Not least of those touched by the saga was Warshaw himself, whose post-Atari life was marked by a series of failed attempts to recapture the magic before he at last found peace. On hand for the screening, Warshaw received a standing ovation from the crowd. Talking about it afterwards, Warshaw seemed overwhelmed to see the entire story laid out and reclaimed — including testimonies from gaming experts today that E.T., despite a few flaws, is actually a decent, interesting game. Warshaw confessed it has been a bit painful to go back, but said that the film is “wonderful. I was really pleased with what I saw.”
