After 30 years of fucking up video game movies, Hollywood has finally figured out what makes them tick: Giving the audience exactly what it wants. All that Chicken Jockeying and Mario Kart racing carried Minecraft and two Super Mario movies to a billion-dollar gross. While the former is due to genuine interest from younger audiences, who major studios long assumed wanted more Captain America, Illumination’s Mario movies benefited from nostalgic parents taking their kids to pay tribute to Toad on the silver screen. We can only presume Universal hopes for a similar result from the 10-property development deal it entered with Atari.
Per Deadline, Atari’s intellectual property that Universal hopes 50-year-olds still have nostalgia for are Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong and Yars’ Revenge. Few, if any, of those games have enjoyed long lives after the Atari 2600, though many were ported to other consoles and repackaged in retro and vintage games collections. Nevertheless, the idea is to turn them into “big-scale action-adventure fare” wherein a moving platform launches and/or bounces balls at other platforms. Though they didn’t specify which title is first, the studio is reportedly excited about a spec script from Matt Reilly, a former Universal executive turned screenwriter, and Carl Hampe, a former producer turned screenwriter. If all goes to plan, one day, they’ll have a credit on a Breakout movie.
On its face, it’s hard to imagine adapting any of these games into movies. A “big-scale action-adventure” Pong, even if many remember the name, is a tall order. Even Tetris, the other go-to example for “worst imaginable video game movie,” side-stepped gameplay for its movie version and became a political thriller about the attempt to license the game during the Cold War. One could easily imagine a biopic about the making of Pong. Less so with 1980’s Adventure, a title that would look like a placeholder on a poster. But who knows, maybe Reilley and Hampe have a really good take on Yars’ Revenge.
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