Long, long ago (in the 1980s) in a galaxy far, far away (or maybe right here in the United States, I get confused sometimes) there was a video game company named Atari and they owned the world. Well, not really, but close enough. It came from nowhere, built a HUGE following (Seriously, if you're around my age you played Atari. If you didn't own one then someone you knew did.) and then it flamed out like a meteor upon re-entry. This meteor, rumor had it, had buried itself and a game named E.T. The Extraterrestrial in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in an effort to hide the existence of the biggest flop in video game history. The story is told by Zak Penn in his movie Atari: Game Over in cooperating with FilmRise.
The death of Atari was something that shook the world of one James Ricky McCoy Jr in the mid-80s. The vast majority of my friends had Ataris. I had an Intellivision (I didn't get my Atari until the late 90s, oddly enough) but when Atari fell it took everyone else with it. For awhile there it was assumed that video games had been a fad and would never be seen again. Looking back on it now, we all obviously know the story of the rise of Nintendo and its role in saving the industry. At the time though, no one knew that was coming. I was kind of ticked. I really like video games and I wanted one to play at home.
The story of the rise of the video game industry (in both its coin operated and home versions) is one that has been retold ad infinitum, but what makes Atari: Game Over special is its hook (the search for the lost E.T. games) and the fact that it includes information from so many of the game designers that worked for Atari. Also, the one thing that I don't remember ever seeing mentioned previously is the emphasis on the rise of story-based video gaming after the fall of Atari. Video gaming underwent a change to the basis of its formulation that could only be fixed by the rise of story and the then-next generation consoles that allowed it. To be fair though, that's not the focus.
The story begins with the story of the E.T. game. It wasn't JUST a flop, it was a floptastic flop. I remember one of my friends buying this game back in the day. We hated it. If we hadn't turned it off at one point, our little E.T. character would probably still be falling now, thirty years later. That game was brutal. What I didn't know until watching this movie (although I'm sure lots of other people knew) was that it had been rushed to market after five weeks in development. That's insane. Game design times were shorter then because the games were simpler but nowhere near THAT short.
There is a brief interlude in the movie where Penn makes his case that E.T. was not a failed game and that Howard Scott Warshaw, the designer of the game, has been unfairly blamed for the fall of the company. He makes it well. Warshaw was the only designer to have made multiple games for Atari and not work on one that sold less than a million copies. At the end of the day, he has me convinced.
The story is so much bigger than just the game though. Atari HQ was apparently a party place unmatched even by my first bachelor pad. Things were live there. Details of marijuana use and keggers flow freely at the beginning of the movie. These guys were not the way I pictured them at all. I've always figured that game designers would be like my buddy who makes his living programming: Very intelligent, but kind of uptight. I'll say this much for myself: I appear to have at least gotten the intelligent part right. These guys were party animals. I'd love to work in that type of an environment.
Atari: Game Over is a documentary but it's a very well done one. The host has personality, the people he interviews are entertaining and personable. The gaming enthusiasts (I'm not going to say "nerds.") who appear and can't wait to find out if the games really are buried in the desert are just like me. Hearing the history was cool, but watching these people waiting made me jealous. I'll obviously never get a chance to show up at the actual dig, but I don't think I'll ever stop wishing I was either.
The director of the piece, Zak Penn, got the length of this movie just about perfect at just over an hour. Is there more he could have included? Probably. Are there things he could have left out? Well, probably that too. I don't think he could have cut anything without losing something. Nor do I believe that he left out anything I really had to know. This is one documentary that moves well, bouncing from person to person and subject to subject yet remaining coherent in its narrative. I took a writing class in college where the prof told us that "A paper should be like a woman's skirt: Long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting." Granted this is a movie and not a "paper" per se, but Penn has done exactly that here. Kudos to him.
I won't spoil half of the ending. (The other half being that Atari does indeed fail.) I will tell you that there is a dig in the desert. What, if anything they find (other than sand which they do indeed find in abundance) is something best discovered by watching the movie. Will our heroes discover what they have set out to find or will they go down in ignominius defeat searching for something that never existed? Will they find the Holy Grail of gaming or be laughed at for the rest of their natural lives? Go find out. I'm sure glad I did.
Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Joysticks
Atari: Game Over
Filmrise, 2015
Atari: Game Over can be purchased here:
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Showing posts with label Console Gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Console Gaming. Show all posts
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Anchor Bay's Video Games: The Movie (2015)
Ok, so this was supposed to be a review of Jeb Kinnison's Nemo's World: The Substrate Wars. That will still happen, only it will be on Tuesday. The thing here is that I woke up late and decided to watch a movie before I wrote my blog today. What I watched isn't technically SF/F but it is related and I was so blown away that I had to write about it. I found this accidentally and I loved it. Given the fact that I didn't even know it existed yesterday I thought I might help some of you find it.
Now you're all wondering what I watched that has me so excited. It's a documentary called Video Games: The Movie. I was impressed to say the least. At one point in my life I actually took enough time away from reading/writing/watching SF/F to earn a history degree. I have loved documentaries for decades. This is one of the best I've ever seen. What's more, it's a terrific story about something I have lived and loved for about the same amount of time. Video Games: The Movie is well thought out, well structured and incredibly broad based without being preachy or needlessly repetitive. In short, writer/director Jeremy Snead either knew both the video game industry and the art of making an entertaining documentary going in or he learned both in hurry. The voice over was done by Sean Astin and he is up to usual high standards (I loved him in both Rudy and The Lord of the Rings). He imparts his information quickly enough to keep it interesting and efficiently enough to give us all of the information we need.
When I first turned this on I was expecting a brief history of gaming, a little bit about the individual consoles, maybe a mention of PC gaming and a lot about technical issues. I mean, let's face it: I LOVED Pitfall when it was new but by 1990 it was a joke. There has been a ton of innovation and invention over the last few decades. There was a discussion of the technology. There had to be. There was also discussion of history going back to the 70s (silly me thought that Pong was the first video game. I stand corrected.) a bit about the perceived link between video games and violence, a discussion of what makes a video game (which included an entertaining but somewhat odd claim that Facebook is a videogame) and a really fun part about gaming culture. I want to take a minute and talk about that because it's something they covered really well and it's something I find to be important.
Gaming culture, and nerd culture in general is way beyond what it was when I was a kid. When they called me "Encyclopedia McCoy" in reference to the Encyclopedia Brown books I was pretty much on my own. It got a little better when I got a little older and there were a few of us in junior high and a few more in high school but things have exploded. The connections made through Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games like Everquest or World of Warcraft et al. are real. I have spoken to many of the people I played WoW with on the phone and I would LOVE a chance to reconnect with my old EQ crew. (Seriously. Aaniamen, Resta, Fyrelyght, Utamr, Iinien, Denniker, Beoheart, Lemleyka, Midnite or any of the rest of my crew, if you see this, hit me up. I can get hold of Ayetappa for you if you want as well.). Many people would poo-poo the thought but it happens and it's not just limited to gaming. I've spent only God knows how many hours talking to a woman I met on Facebook via Baen's Bar and enjoying it immensely. I hope to meet her IRL soon as well. This type of thing is going to become more - not less- common among us Odds out there in the future and I'm glad they mentioned it.
The nostalgia I felt watching this movie cannot be overstated. There were shots from Asteroids, Galaga , Pac Man, Super Mario Brothers (the original), Centipede, Command and Conquer, Sonic the Hedgehog, the list goes on and on. The hair on my arms stood up in spots. It was a trip that started with my childhood (my first system was an Intellivision. I had an Atari, too.) and ended like last year some time. I'm sure Snead would've included something from this year as well, but the movie came out in January so it's not like he had a chance.
Is the movie perfect? Well, no nothing is. It's not far from it though. I would've been happier with a bit more discussion of MMORPGs as I see them as being a separate genre of video game, but that's just me being a whiner. I've got over sixty days played on one character in Everquest (for those that don't know that doesn't mean that I played the game for two months. It means I spent over one thousand four hundred and forty hours playing seated in front of my PC playing just that character. It doesn't count any of the other characters I played on that account or in that game. Or any other game I've played.) and about thirty days on one character in WoW. The title sequence was a bit of a bummer too. It was video from several different classic games. I thought for a second that the whole movie would be like that. I was almost relieved when I heard a human voice cut in. Oh, and they left out Shinobi and the Sega Master System. If we're being honest both were decisions that made sense, but that was MY system that I got because I wanted THAT game and well.... I'm bitter. I'll survive but be warned that if your favorite isn't one of the icons it might not be there. Other than that though, it doesn't get much better in terms of entertainment, information and nostalgia.
Bottom Line: 4.9 out of 5 stars.
Video Games: The Movie
Anchor Bay, 2014
Now you're all wondering what I watched that has me so excited. It's a documentary called Video Games: The Movie. I was impressed to say the least. At one point in my life I actually took enough time away from reading/writing/watching SF/F to earn a history degree. I have loved documentaries for decades. This is one of the best I've ever seen. What's more, it's a terrific story about something I have lived and loved for about the same amount of time. Video Games: The Movie is well thought out, well structured and incredibly broad based without being preachy or needlessly repetitive. In short, writer/director Jeremy Snead either knew both the video game industry and the art of making an entertaining documentary going in or he learned both in hurry. The voice over was done by Sean Astin and he is up to usual high standards (I loved him in both Rudy and The Lord of the Rings). He imparts his information quickly enough to keep it interesting and efficiently enough to give us all of the information we need.
When I first turned this on I was expecting a brief history of gaming, a little bit about the individual consoles, maybe a mention of PC gaming and a lot about technical issues. I mean, let's face it: I LOVED Pitfall when it was new but by 1990 it was a joke. There has been a ton of innovation and invention over the last few decades. There was a discussion of the technology. There had to be. There was also discussion of history going back to the 70s (silly me thought that Pong was the first video game. I stand corrected.) a bit about the perceived link between video games and violence, a discussion of what makes a video game (which included an entertaining but somewhat odd claim that Facebook is a videogame) and a really fun part about gaming culture. I want to take a minute and talk about that because it's something they covered really well and it's something I find to be important.
Gaming culture, and nerd culture in general is way beyond what it was when I was a kid. When they called me "Encyclopedia McCoy" in reference to the Encyclopedia Brown books I was pretty much on my own. It got a little better when I got a little older and there were a few of us in junior high and a few more in high school but things have exploded. The connections made through Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games like Everquest or World of Warcraft et al. are real. I have spoken to many of the people I played WoW with on the phone and I would LOVE a chance to reconnect with my old EQ crew. (Seriously. Aaniamen, Resta, Fyrelyght, Utamr, Iinien, Denniker, Beoheart, Lemleyka, Midnite or any of the rest of my crew, if you see this, hit me up. I can get hold of Ayetappa for you if you want as well.). Many people would poo-poo the thought but it happens and it's not just limited to gaming. I've spent only God knows how many hours talking to a woman I met on Facebook via Baen's Bar and enjoying it immensely. I hope to meet her IRL soon as well. This type of thing is going to become more - not less- common among us Odds out there in the future and I'm glad they mentioned it.
The nostalgia I felt watching this movie cannot be overstated. There were shots from Asteroids, Galaga , Pac Man, Super Mario Brothers (the original), Centipede, Command and Conquer, Sonic the Hedgehog, the list goes on and on. The hair on my arms stood up in spots. It was a trip that started with my childhood (my first system was an Intellivision. I had an Atari, too.) and ended like last year some time. I'm sure Snead would've included something from this year as well, but the movie came out in January so it's not like he had a chance.
Is the movie perfect? Well, no nothing is. It's not far from it though. I would've been happier with a bit more discussion of MMORPGs as I see them as being a separate genre of video game, but that's just me being a whiner. I've got over sixty days played on one character in Everquest (for those that don't know that doesn't mean that I played the game for two months. It means I spent over one thousand four hundred and forty hours playing seated in front of my PC playing just that character. It doesn't count any of the other characters I played on that account or in that game. Or any other game I've played.) and about thirty days on one character in WoW. The title sequence was a bit of a bummer too. It was video from several different classic games. I thought for a second that the whole movie would be like that. I was almost relieved when I heard a human voice cut in. Oh, and they left out Shinobi and the Sega Master System. If we're being honest both were decisions that made sense, but that was MY system that I got because I wanted THAT game and well.... I'm bitter. I'll survive but be warned that if your favorite isn't one of the icons it might not be there. Other than that though, it doesn't get much better in terms of entertainment, information and nostalgia.
Bottom Line: 4.9 out of 5 stars.
Video Games: The Movie
Anchor Bay, 2014
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