ironhorse_iv Review of Atari: Game Over

Atari: Game Over (2014)

Atari: Game Over. Is this low-budget documentary, worth digging up? Somewhat. It's just very, very kitsch.

[7/10 · 7 March 2019]

From all the notorious video game urban legends out there. The most infamous rumor has to be, the story about how Atari got rid of millions of unsold 1982 gaming cartridges versions of Steven Spielberg's sci-fi movie, 'E. T. the Extraterrestrial', by burying it in a landfill in the Alamogordo desert; during the early 1980s. In 2014, Fuel Industries, Microsoft, and others worked with the official New Mexico state administrations, to excavate the site, to validate the contents of the landfill as part of a documentary directed by Zak Penn, called 'Atari: Game Over'. I'm sorry to say this, but this 2014 movie didn't unearthed much. The film was somewhat overblown. In reality, there is hardly any mystery. There's plenty of evidence prior to the event excavation that already told enough, what exactly is buried in the landfill in 1983. In fact, there was a whole opening interview with an ex Atari warehouse manager, that explains, that it is a standard common practice in manufacturing, that extra cargo will indeed get tossed. However, that information was later cut from the final version of this film. Why? It's because in order to mislead the audience and build up the suspense that Atari shamefully cover it up due to some type of a scandal. I found this approach toward documentary filmmaking to be highly sensational & immoral. Purposely misleading the viewers by providing false information into believing that Atari did something wrong for the sake of entertainment is tabloid and yellow. That's one of the biggest problems of the film. All of the manipulations tactics are downright wrong. It's dishonest. They have a responsibility as documentarians to report the events, accurate, yet they didn't. It really hurts the films' credibility. It didn't help that the movie wasted time on unreliable sources, such as author Ernest Cline. I get that Cline is supposed to represent the everyman fan, but it feels like he is crammed in, just as a background. His scenes really don't add much, so in truth, they should had been cut from the film. Despite that, the flick does contains some really cool interviews from game developers, Nolan Bushnell, Howard Scott Warshaw & other Atari figureheads about the rise and fall of Atari through a cheeky, foul-mouthed sense of humor. These sequences are easily the best part of the movie. For a low budget film, the production values here are rather good with the amazing graphics & transitions, they used. It was also well mixed in, with the talking head interviews & stock footage from both films, news and television. Plus, every camera movement during this, was well shot. My only complain about these scenes, is the fact that they gloss over a lot of the complexities of the gaming crash of 1983. Adding further information about that, would had been more insightful. Regardless, I like how the movie defend the developer and his creation. The game just got a bad rap. After all, to say that the game alone killed the company isn't exactly fair. 'E. T' was indeed playable. The controls weren't broken. The visuals were passable for that era, even if some of the items and enemies are hard to figure out at first. It's just time consuming, frustrating, and monotonous. Honestly, if you figure out how to avoid the pitfalls, you might find this quickly produce game worth playing if you wanted the challenge. To be fair, rushed game development, studio interference, poor relationship with distributors, an increasing number of order cancellations, new competitors entering the market, and lack of a profitable marketing strategy to keep gamers, still interested in the product, cause 'E. T' to underperformed the most. There were other problems, such as market saturation, competition from home computers, and global inflation that led to the failure. Though it was believed that millions of copies of the game were disposed in that landfill, in truth, the dump site had various titles, regardless, if it was successful or not. It just proves that the 'E. T.' game was not the major contributing factor for the demise of Atari. Because of that, the climatic ending was a bit underwhelming to watch. Regardless of that, this documentary is still an entertaining film. It's truly, worth checking out on Netflix, Showtime or XBOX live for free. It's one movie, that doesn't belong in the dumps.