Asteroids: The Movie? It could be one of 10 classic videogames coming to the big screen courtesy of Atari and Universal Pictures. A bunch of old videogames could soon become a battalion of movie blockbusters. That’s if a set of plans hatched by Atari, Universal Pictures and production company Entertainment 360 come to fruition at ... Atari and Universal are partnering to make 10 videogame movies, including Asteroids
Asteroids: The Movie? It could be one of 10 classic videogames coming to the big screen courtesy of Atari and Universal Pictures.
A bunch of old videogames could soon become a battalion of movie blockbusters. That’s if a set of plans hatched by Atari, Universal Pictures and production company Entertainment 360 come to fruition at any rate.
The three companies have recently signed a deal that could see such 1970s and 80s games as Asteroids, Missile Command, Berzerk, Centipede and Pong get the big screen treatment. There are 10 videogames that could be adapted in total – the others being Adventure, Breakout, Millipede and Yars’ Revenge.
Hellboy producer Carl Hampe and former Universal executive Matt Reilly have co-written a spec script based on one of these games, which is said to have created the impetus behind the whole Atari-Universal-Entertainment 360 deal.
Which game has he based his script on? Deadline, which first reported on the deal, doesn’t say.
“Matt Reilly and I grew up playing Atari 2600 games and have remained fans ever since,” said Guymon Casady, a producer at Entertainment 360. “The best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest. Carl and Matt saw an opportunity to take that same spirit and build an original, large-scale adventure around it. From the moment we read the screenplay, we believed there was a great movie here.”
If you’re getting a bit of deja vu from this story, there’s a reason for that: there have been multiple attempts to adapt Atari’s old 8-bit games in the past. There was a deal to turn Missile Command into a movie at 20th Century Fox back in 2010. That never seemed to get anywhere.
Then in 2016, a company called Emmett/Furla Oasis Films hatched a deal with Atari to make its own Missile Command movie as well as an adaptation of Centipede.
One hurdle all these projects face is the flimsiness of the original games themselves. Arcade games of this vintage tended to be high on action and low on characters and plot; Asteroids is about shooting rocks in space. Centipede is about shooting a, er, centipede. Missile Command is about shooting nuclear missiles.
The main thing they have going for them is their brand familiarity, though even here the window may be closing: these are games that were big 40 or 50 years ago. A generation that has grown up on Minecraft and Roblox has probably never heard of them.
There is one Atari game that has tonnes of brand recognition: its frankly incredible 1983 coin-op, Star Wars. If someone could adapt that into a movie, it could do serious numbers. Call it a hunch.
