Am I the only person on my block who never knew that the old E.T. game for the Atari 2600 was the worst game of the 80s? I always liked it. Sure, I was six years old, but the game was made for six year olds. I was the target audience and Atari nailed me right between the eyes like I was a Space Invader. Like a lot of little kids in 1982, I got E.T. for Christmas that year and there’s a good chance that I was still playing it in September 1983 when legend has it that Atari dumped truckloads of unsold copies of the game—buried their bomb—in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Like Yoko Ono and the Beatles, E.T., and its terrible reception, got blamed in popular rhetoric for the downfall of Atari. As with many companies that rise quickly, Atari fell hard and fast under the heavy weights of hubris and market saturation. Young gamers might find it hard to imagine today, but there was about five years in the mid-1980s when home video games were considered a fad that had passed. Cool for awhile, now unwanted. Marked down at Toys R Us. There were other game consoles out there (my neighbors had Colecovision; I would weasel my way over there almost everyday to play Burger Time), but Atari was the face of the industry, the one name that everyone knew and when they weren’t cool anymore, nobody was. Until Nintendo came along.
This documentary crams a lot into a mere hour and six minutes. It’s lean and entertaining and it has three missions:
1) Tell the story of Atari when it was briefly on top of the world with an in-house design team of drug-adled longhairs who got high openly in the office and then came down with ideas for new games. They were like pulp writers, slinging out entertainment within the limitations of primitive pixels. Computer nerds gone rogue, these people shaped the newest, weirdest big money industry and, to hear some of them tell it, had the time of their lives doing it.
2) Vindicate E.T.. Tell the real story of how Atari paid an insane $20 million (some say they paid even more than that) in 1982 money for the game rights to the film after it became a blockbuster that summer and then had an absurd five-week window of time to create it from scratch to make the Christmas season. They gave the job to Howard Scott Warshaw, one of Atari’s secret stars who designed Yar’s Revenge and the game version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Over thirty years later, Warshaw reminisces here, never complaining once about the assignment. He accepted the challenge and got the job done (a little high on marijuana, but a stalwart nonetheless). When Warshaw talks about it today, he sounds like a soldier who won HIS battle while his side lost the war—and then saw himself get blamed.
3) Document the thirty-years-later excavation of that piece of landfill space in the wind-blown desert of Alamogordo to see if Atari REALLY did bury their children there. It’s the Al Capone’s Vault for geekfaces. The event attracted a big crowd of nerds in their nerd shirts to gawk on the sidelines. Did the makers find that cache of Atari history buried under three decades of detritus? I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that director Zak Penn, Hollywood screenwriter who’s made a career out of being a geek with a credits list packed with comic book adaptations, makes multiple Indiana Jones allusions to the whole affair, like a true 80s kid. I relate.
I want to get over my childhood, but the movies won’t let me. Can someone make a game about that? I’ll give you more than five weeks.