Atari Game Missile Command Getting Movie Adaptation

Legendary Atari game Missile Commander will be adapted into a movie by 20th Century Fox, Variety reports. Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama will write the film, and Peter Chernin and Dylan Clark will produce through Chernin entertainment; Jim Wilson of Atari will executive produce....  read more

Start Press: 'Roid Rage

Early last week I found myself suddenly, utterly engrossed in a Seattle locksmith's quest to topple the world-record high score in arcade classic Asteroids. The score to beat, set in 1982 by Scott Safran, stood at the confounding perch of 41,336,440 points. Safran’s high score had proved to be one of the most stubbornly enduring high scores in retro-gaming’s history, largely due to the unthinkable stretch of playtime required to accomplish the feat—not hours, but days. While learning to guide your tiny spaceship deftly around splintered, drifting asteroid shards can be effectively mastered without a Sysiphian expenditure of effort, the...  read more

Universal Snags Movie Rights to Atari's Asteroids

The video game movie didn't exactly have a glorious beginning, but they're permanent fixtures in Hollywood these days as studios race to to snap up the film rights to video game properties, enticed by the allure of big box-office returns. It was inevitable that this exuberance would eventually go overboard, and we may have arrived at the genre's shark-jumping moment: Universal Pictures has emerged from a bidding war as the buyer of the rights to the Asteroids movie....  read more