When Zak Penn's Atari: Game Over launched in November last year, I called it "a wonderful movie ... a love story about video games, the people who play them and the people who make them."
Unfortunately, at the time the film was only shown via Xbox Live. But starting Feb. 2, it will also be available through other on-demand services.
Atari: Game Over, as this trailer shows, is a documentary about the hunt to find unsold copies of the E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial video game (1982) that were said to have been buried in a landfill in New Mexico, more than 30 years ago. Although the excavation provides the story's spine, it's also about the Atari 2600 era as a whole and the phenomenon of fandom. It dares to offer new perspectives on that era, not least through some great interviews with developers and execs who dominated gaming at the time.
