Movie Review Monday: Atari - Game Over
Welcome to another awesome edition of Movie Review Monday!
This week's film is the 2014 documentary, Atari: Game Over, directed by Zak Penn.
The premise of this adventure surrounds the urban legend of millions of Atari 2600 game cartridges being buried in the New Mexico desert due to the collapse of the company which was caused by the ill-fated E.T. The Extra Terrestrial video game. So the legend goes, but in this documentary, the full story is explored and we learn that there is more to the nerd folklore than is thought.
We get a pretty fun history of the Atari company, it's meteoric rise and fall, and how the rumor even came to be in the first place. We find that there are many people fascinated and obsessed with finding these supposedly buried pieces of video game history, and we see what they have to go through to even begin to try to dig them up and find them to put to rest the debate once and for all.
I liked the nerdy angle to this story and the depth that they go into it for the documentary. Penn (a legitimate nerd in his own right) gives a full history of what led to the rumor as well as the people and choices behind Atari's infamous game. I never knew any of the full story involved with this whole debacle so it was neat to hear it from the people who lived it back in 1983.
The documentary is short (it only runs a little over an hour), fun, and captures the geek spirit of being obsessed with things and needing to have answers. I remembered always hearing about this legend so I was excited to watch this and finally get an answer!
You can catch Atari: Game Over streaming right now on Netflix.