Alamogordo, New Mexico, may harbor a treasure trove of what many have dubbed the worst video game of all time. But it’s a treasure the city and Atari fans will have to dig for. And according to the treasure map, X marks the city landfill.
Filmmaker Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand scribe) rifles through the urban legend of Atari’s massive E.T. cartridge dump of the early 1980’s. A desperate act by a declining company with an overflowing, inert inventory, burying it under a slab of concrete, tens of feet underground was a low-cost solution.
Atari commanded the video game market in its heyday. It made massive amounts of money. Incentives were measured in beer; creative ideas were doobie-inspired. In the vein of how we perceive present-day Google, with its nap pods and Segways, it was the “cool” place to work. At Atari, Howard Scott Warshaw found where he belonged. He was at home in the lax atmosphere, where he materialized multi-million dollar ideas, designing the era’s best-selling games. He was on cloud nine.
But Warshaw was set up for virtual failure when asked for an adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster hit E.T.: Extra-Terrestrial. With only five highly caffeinated weeks before his deadline, he churned out E.T. just in time to sell for Christmas. Sell they did. And returned for cash they were. It’s hard not to feel for the emotional Warshaw when he expresses the highs and lows of his Atari tenure, and his short-lived game designing career. For Warshaw–and many others–digging up the past could put to rest decades of guilt and shame he’s needed quelled.
Penn’s merciful doc is airy, fun, and cathartic. But it suffers from an ironic conclusion–it’s too short. Even the video game generation, those self-entitled Millennials, could handle a more in-depth peek into Atari’s infancy, its party-filled adolescence, and its untimely demise. The film shifts between two narratives, between Atari & Warshaw and the liberating excavation of a 30-year-old catalog. It’s plain to see that Atari the Company and Warshaw the Man are of more interest, ripe with drama and feeling. But the disinterment of consoles on a gusty, dusty day in the desert is a cathartic cleaning of Warshaw’s emotional closet. This might serve a greater purpose than a critic’s cynicism.
Mr. Penn clips together a nice history of a niche community’s genesis. Not the saga it could be, nor a wispy, waning emancipation, Atari: Game Over is at least brisk, youthful and committed. At the risk of underestimating the power of hyperbole, it’s worth betting you’ll see no better movie about digging up trash this year.
Atari: Game Over can be found on Xbox Live, or gratis at xbox.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment.