As we’ve just reported on TGD, Xbox is moving into creating their own TV shows, and rumor has it the first series may be Halo. Now there’s news that Xbox will be making documentaries about video games, and the first installment is going to be a doozy.
As Collider tells us, the first installment is going to be about E.T. the game, which was one of the most legendary disasters in gaming history. Zak Penn, screenwriter of X-Men The Last Stand and The Last Action Hero, will direct.
Now you may be wondering why anyone would make a documentary about a game that flopped, but it is indeed a fascinating story of a title that seemingly couldn’t lose, and it was a precursor to the demise of the gaming market in the early eighties. E.T. was the biggest movie in the world at the time, and Atari had just come off its biggest year ever, but things soon came to a crashing halt with this game. (Atari didn’t blame the E.T. game for the demise of the company, but it was definitely a catalyst.)
There were tons of unsold E.T. cartridges that wound up in a landfill, and we assume this documentary will head out to that site, which we’re very curious to see. (There’s still plenty of copies of the E.T. game you can buy on Ebay if you’d like to have one, and it would make a great stocking stuffer for Xmas.)
We assume there will be documentaries on great video games from Xbox as well, but you can learn a lot from failure, and the story of the E.T. game could probably teach us a lot about the nature of the gaming business today. The biz is just as mercurial as ever, but we feel that it would take more than one disastrous game to bring things to a halt these days
