'Atari: Game Over' review

[AArdvark]

This one came out a couple three years ago and it took me this long to get around to watching it. It's the story of the urban legend surrounding the E.T. cartridge...Oh, you all know all about it, let's just get to the review part.

There's a documentary technique that I like to call the 'yup yup yup' (after the Sesame Street aliens). I think it started in reality television. You see it a lot on shows like: 'The 100 most shocking moments on prime time' specials.
They show some footage and the narrator tells you what you're looking at. Then they cut to one or more personalities that all agree with what the narrator said. They do this over and over. If it's done sparingly it's not too loathsome. I've been seeing it way too much however and it's grating to me.
The story was good but I wanted to see more hot 1970s Atari action. More behind the scenes goings-on in Silicon Valley. There were a lot of anecdotes in the Microsoft Arcade and Revenge of Arcade packs and I wanted this show to tell me about them in more detail. Granted, it was mainly about the ET game but most everyone knows that story (except that I heard all the carts were under a giant slab of concrete)

One more thing that wasn't covered was the decision to bury the stuff in the first place. Sure, the games weren't worth anything and they weren't about to pay for storage but they could have had a warehouse /garage sale or something.

Theres more when I think of it


BRB

[Flack]

If you liked that you should track down the Once Upon An Atari films. They go into a lot more detail in regards to the 70s stuff.

One thing I either heard or read was that the returned E.T. carts came back as "returns" (similar to defective merchandise) which would have meant that they would have had to have jumped through a lot of hoops to resell them as new games, and since they already had millions of new copies they couldn't sell, it was cheaper to just get rid of them.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I heard that Henry Thomas jerked off into the big vat of plastic cartridge mix.

[AArdvark]

I just played ET for the first time ever and...It does suck. Then I watched a video of someone playing it ( and explaining what to do) and it didn't suck quite so much. It didn't make me want to turn the rom back on though.

I guess most 2600 games had limitations. I remember waiting in line at Gold Circle because my friend was getting Pac Man on it's first day release. I was astounded that someone would actually pay $39.99 for a GAME! I thought ten to fifteen bucks was a lot back then.
We rushed back to his house and boy, were we disapointed. Just played that rom as well. Still disapointed.

The other parts of the documentary that I disliked was the programmer getting all weepy because they dug up the trash. Sure, I get it. I get the urban legend aspect of the dig. What I don't get is how recently this happened. It was only thirty years ago and now it's a major archeological event. Heinrich Schliemann dug up a 1200 year old city, now that was a dig. This had the flavor of a publicity stunt or somthing.
I did like how they went about locating the exact spot to dig, that was cool, but maybe they should have waited a couple hundred years.

THE
NOTHING BUT TIME
AARDVARK