This past April, Microsoft funded a highly-publicized excavation of a landfill in New Mexico, in which Atari had supposedly buried countless unsold copies of the famously awful game adaptation of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. Although it wasn’t a secret – it was covered by journalists at the time – the event had faded into urban legend because of its silly premise and its ties to the industry crash that tanked the North American video games market for a few years after its initial bubble in the early 1980s. Penn’s documentary will cover the excavation itself and the events that led to it three decades ago.
Related: Legendary Atari video game stash uncovered in the New Mexico desert
The film is one of the few projects to survive the recent collapse of Microsoft’s short-lived Xbox Entertainment Studios, along with the Ridley Scott-produced series Halo: Nightfall. Game Over was set to be first of a six-part series, called Signal to Noise, about the video game industry, but the fate of the rest of the series is not clear.
