Once Upon Atari (2003)
In the late 70s and early 80s, ET phoned home on Atari 2600 and became the video game that New Media magazine later described as having toppled a billion dollar industry. We know the industry rose again as a pale, commercial version of its old self, but… did you ever wonder what it was like back in the wild days when the titans of gaming clashed, not on Wall Street, but inside the minds of designers? Want to learn first hand how the barren valley south of The Bay gave birth to cult celebrity that died as quickly as it was born? Take the ride with the folks who made it happen. Walk on walls, smoke the evil weed, and plunge head first into the uncharted (undocumented) world that was game production back in the bad old days.
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As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
90 mns of interviews with Atari game programmers after Atari's extreme success and failure. Rhetoric about their wages, their relationships with other programmers and the smell of marijuana smoke creeping into the office of the Director of Software. He would hold his meetings somewhere else if it was that late into the afternoon.Tod Frye cut his head on a sprinkler when walking the walls of hallways. He had long legs.The engineers/programmers talk about management, gameplay and how clueless marketing was. Some programmers were porting (and recreating arcade games) and some created their own games. No mention of the director's Yar's Revenge or E.T. Looks like its shopping a potential biopic with Matt Damon and what's her fat face. Julia Stiles. She's pretty sometimes