Just how nostalgic are Olds™ for Atari? We’re about to find out.
Deadline reports that Unviersal has signed a deal that gives them “the right to develop 10 classic Atari video game properties for the big screen.” They have also bought a project based on Atari IP, based on a screenplay by Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe.
The 10 Atari movies that are included in the pact: Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong and the immortal classic Yars’ Revenge.
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Deadline claims the films are intended as “big-scale action-adventure fare.”
I am most certainly an Old™, but I’m only familiar with about half the titles that Universal just grabbed. (Crystal Castles rings exactly zero bells with me. I looked it up on Wikipedia, too; still nothing.) So I’d be pretty surprised if all of these games do get movies. But after the successes of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Sonic the Hedgehog, and A Minecraft Movie, the studios are hungry for similar properties with similar potential.
I guess I can see Asteroids becoming something like that, but man, some of these Atari movies were so small in scale, they are going to require a lot of imagination. (Pong: The Movie … wild to even ponder.) The Atari 2600 was hamstrung by late 1970s technology; the graphics were blocky and static and most took place entirely on a single screen. Perhaps with a name like Asteroids or Missile Command you can blow things out, and then hope that the Atari brand and the famous name will help bring in the audiences.
The Atari game everyone would want to see a movie based on is E.T. But that’s not a property owned by Atari, obviously, and it would probably end with a million cartridges dumped in a ditch in New Mexico somewhere.
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