Review: Atari: Game Over

More often than not urban legends are just that:  legends. These fanciful creations may have a glimmer of truth at their heart, but are in general largely exaggerated and embellished to make for a better story. Every so often though, one story proves to be more than just a tall tale.  Atari: Game Over tells the story of what is quite possibly the biggest and most mysterious urban legend in gaming.

The legend goes something like this: E.T. the Extraterrestrial was the hottest movie in the world in 1982. Around that same time, Atari was a rapidly expanding video game company that had recently scored a number of hits, including some licensed games based on movies. What more perfect match could there be? However, according to legend, instead of conquering the commercial world, the E.T. game was so awful that it somehow destroyed the video game industry. As a result, thousands of copies of the game were quietly taken out to the New Mexico desert and buried, never to be seen again. When questioned about the legend, Atari corporate leadership would refuse to comment, only adding fuel to the fiery theory that there was, in fact, some kind of cover up in progress ( all good urban legends need a cover up). If the game were really bad enough to destroy the industry, it makes sense on some level that the developer would want to destroy all copies of it, but it also seems almost unfathomable that one game could destroy an industry and be so bad it warranted burial. As Atari: Game Over explains, however, there is much more to this story than meets the eye.

As all good documentaries should do, Atari: Game Over helps give its audience the complete picture surrounding the events that led to the game burial. Yes, the burial did occur, though not nearly the way the urban legend describes it.

Atari was one of the hottest entertainment options on the market. Their sales were through the roof and it seemed as if they could do no wrong. Helping to lead the charge was game designer Howard Scott Warshaw. Warshaw was responsible for one of Atari’s greatest hits Yar’s Revenge as well as the game version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he was given the nearly impossible task of designing an E.T. game in 5 weeks. At a time when game development usually took a few months, Atari was under a massive deadline in order to have a game out in time for the Christmas season. Under these conditions, Warshaw created and delivered a game that he felt captured the spirit of the movie, though was a little loose with the general plot. This achievement was nothing short of miraculous.

Howard Scott Warshaw

From the point the game came out, things went downhill. While it did well enough at Christmas, sales fell well short of expected benchmarks, especially when word began to spread that the game was considered by many to be nearly unplayable. A few months later, things came crashing down around Atari in what would be the second major crash in the video game industry. From the outside, it was and still is easy to assume a causal relationship between the poor performance of a major launch and the spectacular crash of the company only a few months later. Atari: Game Over does a fantastic job of dispelling this incorrect assumption while taking the audience on a journey to try to find this lost cash of games.

One of the strongest aspects of the documentary is that it manages to tell two parallel stories without getting them lost in one another. Of course they are connected, but Atari: Game Over gives each story enough room to breathe and be independent of the other. I found myself rooting for director Zak Penn and Waste Disposal Expert/Amateur Archeologist Joe Lewandowski to find what they were looking for, and not just because I was hoping to see them find a piece of gaming history. Both were men that felt very passionately about the project, and for different reasons. Penn felt a personal connection to the Atari 2600, while Joe was interested in the legend more from an historical perspective. As they got closer and closer to the big discovery, I could barely contain my excitement. Even though I knew in advance that they found the cache (Xbox’s Major Nelson tweeted about it as it happened) it still didn’t dampen my anticipation.

As is so often the case, reality is far more complicated than appearances. The destruction of Atari was in no way the fault of Howard Scott Warshaw. In fact, even during the crash his bosses were still praising the amazing job he did under immense schedule pressure. No, in the end it was over-saturation in the market that led to Atari’s fall. The fact that it happened to coincide with the crash of E.T. was more bad luck than any other factor. While a better return on E.T. might have served to postpone Atari’s demise, it wasn’t responsible. As for the dump itself, it turned out to be what remained of warehouse purge. Dozens of different Atari titles, including ones that were unbelievably successful, were eventually found at the burial site. Stuck with thousands of cartridges they couldn’t sell, Atari was forced to quietly dispose of them, trying to avoid as much embarrassment as they could.

Finds from the Atari dig site.

Urban legends have a life all unto themselves because we want to believe them. In this particular case, there was more than a little truth behind the rumors. What Atari: Game Over does best is to take the legend, distill the truth, and provide the audience with the appropriate context in which to understand what happened and why it happened. Definitely worth the time of anyone who has even a passing interest in the video game industry.