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In a bid to get people to buy the Xbox One, Microsoft have already confirmed they’ll be hosting exclusive content such as Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming Halo series. However, before that gets a release they’ve got something rather odd up their sleeves, which I actually find more interesting. And it involves E.T.
Lightbox are a company who are promising “a series of films for Xbox Entertainment Studios about the start of the digital revolution”. What’s up first? A documentary about the story of Atari’s apparent burial of millions of copies of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – The Video Game on the Atari 2600 VCS console. Well, technically, it’s another Spielberg production but it certainly wasn’t Atari’s finest hour. The game had a certain curiosity at the time but it was still terrible and I kept falling into the tar pits!
The press release states:
“The first film in the groundbreaking series investigates the events surrounding the great video game burial of 1983. The Atari Corporation, faced with overwhelmingly negative response to “ET the Video Game,” buried millions of unsold game cartridges in the middle of the night, in the small town of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Drawing on their relationships with outstanding creative talent, each film will be helmed by a different director and will range from an hour to feature length. Zak Penn (X-Men 2, Avengers, Incident At Loch Ness) has signed on to direct the first film.”
If you never played the game at the time then you can see what all the… ahem… fuss was about here:
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.