Atari: Game Over

Atari: Game Over (2014)

Truth is stranger than legend...

The Xbox Originals documentary that chronicles the fall of the Atari Corporation through the lens of one of the biggest mysteries of all time, dubbed “The Great Video Game Burial of 1983.” Rumor claims that millions of returned and unsold E.T. cartridges were buried in the desert, but what really happened there?

Date of release
2014-11-19
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (247)
Runtime
1h 6m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Zak Penn

Casting

Interesting facts

Atari: Game Over is a 2014 documentary film directed by Zak Penn. It is about the Atari video game burial excavation. The film was released in 2014 by Microsoft on Xbox Live.

Development

The documentary was first announced on December 19, 2013.

For the documentary, the filmmakers excavated the landfill site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where many E.T. game cartridges were buried. The excavation dig took several months of preparation, and was finally carried out on April 26, 2014. Although the digging had only been planned to go as deep as 18 feet, it actually went to 30 feet. Around 1,300 of the approximately 700,000 games buried were unearthed.

The dig lasted for approximately three hours. Only a small number of games could be recovered, because the local authority of Alamogordo only allowed the dig to last for one day, and ordered the site to be closed by April 27. Seven hundred of the 1,300 games unearthed during the excavation were to be sold by the Alamogordo City Commission, and 100 were given to the film's development companies, Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment.

The remaining 500 games were given to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and local New Mexico museums to be displayed. The film was released by Microsoft via its Xbox Video store on November 20, 2014. In April 2015, it was made available on Netflix and had a broadcast on Showtime.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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