And this week's Friday night movie has been.....Atari: Game Over!
Anyone heard of this? It's a documentary focusing on the video game that was ET that was on the Atari 2600. It discusses it's background, the backlash it copped, the urban legend of how countless copies of the game was buried in landfill and an excavation to unearth said copies to see if the legend was true.
While the parts involving the excavation were fascinating - not to mention the outcome - the real meat here is showing how Atari worked in the early eighties and what kind of environment it was. We get to meet hotshot designer Howard Scott Warshaw - and the documentary goes a long way in restoring his reputation - and shows just how much of a wild west the pioneering / pre-Nintendo console gaming era was.
While it is disappointing that the gaming crash is brief in both it's description and aftermath, this documentary does raise an interesting point about game preservation - and how easily things can be forgotten in an industry that moves so fast that it's difficult to keep up. Some say we may need a new Gaming Crash in order to ditch the dead wood that's clogging up the gaming industry But I am more interested in preserving classics: Far too many of them get claimed by history that would make the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria look tame by comparison.
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