Once Upon Atari

90 mns of interviews with Atari game programmers after Atari's extreme success and failure. Rhetoric about their wages, their relationships with other programmers and the smell of marijuana smoke creeping into the office of the Director of Software. He would hold his meetings somewhere else if it was that late into the afternoon.

Tod Frye cut his head on a sprinkler when walking the walls of hallways. He had long legs.

The engineers/programmers talk about management, gameplay and how clueless marketing was. Some programmers were porting (and recreating arcade games) and some created their own games. No mention of the director's Yar's Revenge or E.T.

Looks like its shopping a potential biopic with Matt Damon and what's her fat face. Julia Stiles. She's pretty sometimes

Howard Scott Warshaw does an excellent job interviewing his legendary associates at Atari who share their hijinks and misadventures while at the gaming giant during the 70s and 80s.

Being a child of the 70s and 80s who spent plenty of time enjoying classic games on the Atari 2600, this documentary offered a rare insight into what was going on behind the scenes. In the early years of the Atari 2600, it was a mystery who was programming all the fun, but we kids were having too much fun to notice. After accidentally stumbling across an Easter egg in Yars Revenge, I always wondered who this HSW person was...

This documentary introduces viewers to many of the brilliant and enjoyable personalities who spent their time creating the magic.

The video quality is a bit dated because it was release in 2003, but it plays well on DVD.

Parental note: There is a small amount of profanity and recollections of drug and alcohol use, plus tales of other shenanigans.

HSW also released a book in 2020 of the same name which goes into much greater detail and also covers the recovery of game cartridges mysteriously buried in a landfill (also covered in Atari: Game Over).