Atari And Universal Sign Deal For The Rights To Adapt 10 Classic Games Like Pong And Breakout Into Films
Over the past few years, video game adaptations have gone from “almost always bad” to “sometimes pretty good,” so it’s no surprise that more and more of gaming’s biggest (and oldest) companies are looking to turn their digital properties into box office hits. According to Deadline, the latest instance of this comes from Atari (partnering with production company Entertainment 360), which just signed a deal with Universal Pictures to adapt ten of its most iconic games into film adaptations. Those games are:
- Asteroids
- Adventure
- Beserk
- Breakout
- Centipede
- Crystal Castles
- Millipede
- Missile Command
- Pong
- Yars’ Revenge
The first screenplay will come from a duo of writers, Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe, both of whom will also produce said picture. Reilly reportedly penned a spec script that kicked off the whole Atari/Universal negotiation process. Entertainment 360’s Guymon Casady, who will also be a producer on the film, said, “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.”
Reilly is best known as a studio executive, working in leadership roles at Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox, though he was most recently the executive vice president at Universal. According to LinkedIn, Reilly is currently president of production and creative at The Arena, a film-producing division of SNK, which Game Informer readers will most likely recognize as the company behind games like Fatal Fury and King of Fighters. SNK has also been scrutinized in recent years due to its acquisition by the Saudi government-owned Electronic Gaming Development Company. Meanwhile, Hampe is better known as a producer and production supervisor, working on films like 2019’s Hellboy, Jungle Cruise, and most recently, 65. Neither Reilly nor Hampe seem to have prominent writing credits.
While Atari has been out of the console game for quite a while now, it’s still around in the modern scene, publishing games like Bubsy 4D and co-publishing Total Chaos. Atari is perhaps best known through its subsidiary, Digital Eclipse, which we recently learned would be releasing retro collections of classic Barbie and Toy Story games.
[Source: Deadline]
