Atari: Game Over

Atari: Game Over (2014) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Zac Penn — the story of the biggest crash in gaming history and the desert dig that tested a 30-year-old rumor.

In the summer of 1983, Atari rushed an E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game to shelves in five and a half weeks. Players hated it. The company reportedly buried millions of unsold cartridges at a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico — then denied it ever happened. Penn assembles the people who were actually there: designer Howard Scott Warshaw, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, former executive Manny Gerard. George R.R. Martin and Werner Herzog also show up, because this story is strange enough to draw anyone in.

The excavation footage is only part of it. What Penn really traces is how a single disastrous release helped bring down an entire industry — the video game crash of 1983 that nearly killed the medium. For anyone curious about how gaming almost ended before it began, this is an unusually candid 66 minutes. Stream Atari: Game Over online on iFILM.