Any nerd worth their salt has heard the rumours about how one terrible video game hobbled the home entertainment giant Atari, and contributed to the massive video game recession of 1983.
That game? E.T. for Atari.
Atari forked out a rumoured US$22 million for the rights to develop a video game tie-in to Steven Spielberg's blockbuster about a homesick little alien. What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot, actually. Christmas Day 1982 got confusing pretty quickly for millions of underwhelmed American kiddies, who complained that their new present "didn't make a whole lot of sense". As one observer put it, the under-developed game "was bad, brutal and unfair".
The company resorted to unconventional methods to kill the bad press and cut their losses. Legend has it that they buried millions of the unsold cartridges somewhere in the middle of the desert in the dead of night - as if cleaning up after an assassin's bullet.
Zak Penn's Atari: Game Over is a fascinating account of the company's meteoric rise and epic fall. Of course, Penn seeks to find out whether those rumours are true: he follows the story to its natural conclusion, to the New Mexico landfill E.T. For Atari allegedly called home for over 30 years.
Watch the trailer below, and catch the documentary on SBS 2 (Thursday 12 November, 9.30pm, and afterwards at SBS On Demand).
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