Find IP. Mine IP. Ruin IP. Rinse. Repeat. Ahhhh, Hollywood. Don’t ever change. Next up to try and do something different by doing exactly what everyone else is doing is Universal, who have reached a deal with Atari.
Atari? Remember them? Game consoles with wooden cases? Hundreds of thousands of ET games buried in a desert somewhere? Yeah, them.
Atari has signed up via Entertainment 360 and Universal Pictures to have Universal develop ten classic Atari video game properties into theatrical releases.
According to the report in Deadline, the ten properties are Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong and Yars’ Revenge.
They want to use these titles as the basis for “big-scale action-adventure fare”. Good luck! Two hours of Pong-based adventure sounds thrilling.
Guymon Casady is producer, and Matt Reilly – an exec – is writing the script alongside Jungle Cruise writer Carl Hampe. Atari chairman and CEO Wade Rosen says in a statement:
“For more than five decades, Atari has created games and worlds that have remained part of popular culture long after their original release. We are excited to work with Universal and Entertainment 360 to bring the spirit of our iconic brand and games to a new medium.”
What could possibly go wrong?
