Notorious E.T. game is unearthed in the first trailer for Atari: Game Over

By Will Fulton Published July 29, 2014

Microsoft has shared the first trailer for Atari: Game Over, the Xbox-exclusive documentary about Atari, the 1983 video game industry crash, and the New Mexico desert mass burial of the famously terrible E.T. game. In April 2014, Microsoft funded an excavation of the New Mexico landfill where Atari dumped thousands of unsold copies of the terrible E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial adaptation that nearly sank the entire emerging video games industry. The documentary, directed by Zak Penn, interviews everyone from the game’s creator and Atari’s executives to residents of Alamogordo, NM, where the unsold games were buried for decades. Atari: Game Over is one of the few projects to escape from the collapse of Xbox Entertainment Studios, which fell as collateral damage to Microsoft’s recent restructuring. The documentary comes out this fall on Xbox Live and xboxvideo.com.

Will Fulton

Former Staff Writer, Gaming

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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