Atari: Game over

A crew digs up all of the old Atari 2600 game cartridges of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" that were tossed into a landfill in the 1980s.

There seem to have been a growing amount of video game documentaries over the last few years (roughly 2012-2015), and many of them understandably focus on Atari and bring up the E.T. story. Most of these are pretty good documentaries. And this is one of them.

This was the first I heard that Atari was filled with drugs and had a party atmosphere. However, knowing what I do of computer geeks in the 1980s and 1990s, this hardly surprises me. Even Steve Jobs had his share of experiments with drugs. (Did Bill Gates?) We also get a cool back story on Yars' Revenge (Atari's best-selling original title for the 2600), but E.T. is really the central focus of this story and it pays off. The truth finally comes out about its promotion, failure, alleged burial and the rumors that the game's notoriety "killed" Atari in 1984. Of course, the brand still exists, but that is a whole other story.