New Documentary ‘Atari: Game Over’ Digs Up Video Game History

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I was six years old when the Atari 2600 game E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released. In the years since, the game has taken on an almost mythical quality in the hearts and minds of many Atari fans, not as something wonderful, but as something so awful (so the story goes) that it was largely responsible for the 1983 collapse of the video game industry.

This notion always bothered me, because to my six-year-old self, E.T. had not been an awful game at all. Broken and frustrating, sure, but also distinctive, ambitious, and most of all, emotionally resonant in a way most games weren’t. You win the game by phoning home and boarding the ship back to E.T.’s home planet, but this victory always seemed bittersweet to me, because it meant saying goodbye to Elliott, who you would then see, in his home, alone. I’d played games that were exciting, or scary, or whimsical, but E.T. was the first game I played that felt poignant.

Within a year of the game’s release, Atari was all but gone.

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Read the rest of my review of Atari: Game Over here on KQED Arts. This guy demands it: 

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