Zak Penn has announced via Twitter that the documentary revolving around the events of the excavation of the 30 year old Atari 2600 game, "E.T: The Extraterrestrial" will be premiered on Xbox Live on November 20 this month.
The game itself was so unpopular that it is largely blamed for the downfall of a dominant console business Atari had built in North America. The game was a rushed job, unpolished, and hastily built in five weeks to be sold in time for the Christmas of 1982. It was such a huge disappointment that in September 1983, almost 20 semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso, Texas were crushed and buried at the landfill within the city. Atari officials gave differing reports of what was buried but it is widely speculated that most of the unsold copies of E.T. are buried in this landfill, crushed and encased in cement.
In April 2014, after almost three decades, an excavation was carried out at the landfill site, partly funded by Microsoft, in which around 800 Atari game cartridges were found. Microsoft announced that on April 26, a documentary of the excavation event would be filmed from 9:30 am to 7:30 and shown on Xbox Live. Shortly after that,on April 28, a brief video clip highlighting the the excavation was shown by Microsoft
The documentary is directed by Zak Penn, best known as a screenwriter for movies like X2: XMen United and Marvel"s The Avengers and is a production of the short-lived Xbox Entertainment Studios which was closed down in July.
Source: Polygon |Images via Atari, IGN and Larry Hyrb