Atari: Game Over

That Atari buried its leftover E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill in 1983 was treated as an urban legend for years. The documentary tells both the story of the dig and the industry crash of 1983. Zak Penn directed; it was made for Microsoft and released free through Xbox. The excavation took place on 26 April 2014 at the Alamogordo landfill. The plan was to go eighteen feet down; they went to thirty. What came out was tiny next to the total: against the roughly seven hundred thousand copies said to be buried, a little over a thousand games were recovered, and the work closed the next day because the city allowed only one day of digging. The real subject is not the cartridges but Howard Scott Warshaw, who designed the game. He had been made to write it in five and a half weeks and spent years named as the man who sank the industry. The documentary takes up that accusation and shows that one game cannot bring down a sector. Who it is for: viewers curious about game history. Who it is not for: anyone wanting deep analysis; it runs sixty-six minutes and moves fast.