JeffTheAlpaca

Anybody seen this?

I was not a Atari enthusiast since my parents never bought it for me but a interesting story on the rise and fall of Atari and the mystery of the E.T. videogame.

Howard Warshaw is somebody I never heard of but surprised Sony or Microsoft did not hire him since he was a genius though if you watch the documentary you understand why but that reasoning still makes no sense.


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y2xfuTRnpns" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

astrochimp

I saw this about a week ago on Netflix. I really enjoyed it.

RichC2

Yeah I thought that was a bit odd too, it's a Showtime doc but debuted on Netflix first.

Decker

Is this different from the one that was free on Xbox last year?

Matthew Chmiel

The documentary was produced by Microsoft Entertainment Studios before Microsoft shuttered the entity. It was always meant to be seen on the Xbox platform like where it was debuted last year.

It's not a Showtime or Netflix production.

rennervision

I wish people would stop calling E.T. the worst video game ever made. It's a frustrating game that didn't meet everyone's high expectations - but it's far from the worst. All Atari had to do was retitle it as "E.T.'s Pitfall Adventure" and then no one would have felt cheated.

Pizza

Boring doc. I wish it was more on Atari than the dig and the ET game. There were no good early Atari games. ET didn't look any worse than the rest of them.

Michael Corvin

I watched it earlier. I thought it was entertaining but it definitely had a split personality. It's as if it started out as an E.T. doc but the filmmakers eventually realized that would fill maybe 20 minutes and had to go back and add in some filler about Atari.

I'd also like to see a proper documentary just on Atari.

wlj

i watched it and found it to be very interesting. ET was a bad game no doubt, but worst ever? I don't think so.

Rob V

So many Atari games were land-fill worthy. As a Star Wars nut, I remember being so disappointed that you could never really "win" The Empire Strikes back. You just fly and shoot AT-AT after AT-AT until you eventually died or quit.

brainee

It was ok, but slight. To most people I'm probably considered a huge nerd, but geeking out over digging up the ET landfill (as if it was some historic event or grand archaeological find) was even too nerdy for me.

I remember from a few years a really good multi-part in-depth cable TV documentary over the rise and fall of the video game industry (up to the mid 80s Atari crash). Does anyone remember what that was called?

Isn't that how the vast majority of arcade games from that era were? Just screen after screen of scoring as many points as you could until you ran out of lives.

Michael Corvin

Yep. Arcade games were designed to eat quarters, not give you an end game.

emachine12

I got this on my XBox last year and for me, it felt like it wasn't trying to tell the story of Atari or the fabled landfill dig. Rather it came off as a redemption film for that programmer behind E.T.:The Video Game.

A lot of it focused on him and his achievements then he says E.T. was his downfall. Then the focus shits to his after Atari life.

Sure there are hints of Atari history and small bites of video game trivia but it just did not feel like a true account of Atari's legacy or even the E.T. legend itself.

Drexl

I haven't seen it, but Once Upon Atari is available on GOG now.

dugan

I've read books from back then that analyzed videogames from a psychologist's perspective. They focused on answering answering: what the hell could possibly appealing about the inevitability of failure?

chuckd21

This is correct.

JTH182

Maybe you're thinking of Rise of the Video Game that was on the Discovery Channel?

Decker

Is the best defense of the ET game that there were plenty of bad Atari games? Because that's not a compelling counter-argument. And while Empire Strikes Back was really The Futility of Hoth, at least it was fun to play for a bit. ET was absolutely zero fun to play and barely resembled the movie's plot. Raiders of the lost Ark wasn't great, was sorely lacking in action for a movie that was instantly considered an action classic, and in many ways was similar to ET, but at least it had some variety and kinda-sorta followed the movie's plot. ET was just bad and fundamentally broken.

I mean Plan 9 From Outer Space might not really be the worst movie of all-time, but it does pretty much live up to the billing. Same with Atari's ET

Ringmaster

I saw this doc last night and thought it was great. I was too young for Atari and raised on Nintendo, so it was cool to see the early side of home console gaming. If you have Netflix, it's not a bad way to spend 70 minutes of your time.

DaveNinja

i enjoyed it

Mikael79

That didn't stop me from loving that game as a child. When the theme song kicked in, I was in heaven.