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Atari 2600 excavation documentary exclusive to Xbox in 2014
An upcoming documentary focused on the video game industry crash of 1983 and the subsequent burial of thousands of unsold Atari cartridges will launch exclusively on Xbox in 2014, Microsoft announced this week. Canadian film production company Fuel Industries plans to head up an excavation of a New Mexico landfill for the documentary, aiming to uncover a derelict batch of Atari hardware and software that the company crushed and encased in concrete more than 30 years ago. The landfill reportedly entombs unsold copies of infamous Atari-licensed releases like E.T. and Pac-Man, among other critically-panned games that led to Atari's closure and sale to Commodore International in 1984. Fuel Entertainment's film will be the first in a series of Xbox-exclusive documentaries launching in 2014 through Microsoft's new media company Lightbox. Microsoft has enlisted the help of producers Simon Chinn (Searching for Sugar Man, Man on Wire) and Jonathan Chinn (FX's 30 Days and PBS's American High) to handle series production. X-Men 2 writer Zak Penn will direct the Atari documentary, which begins shooting in January.
Sideway preview: Spray-on can
We already knew a little something about most of the games seen at Comic-Con this year, from the well-traveled Gears of War 3 to the just-announced Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but Sideway stands alone as the only brand-new title playable on the show floor. It's a platformer coming to PSN with an interesting origin, and a premise that literally turns the genre on its side. The game (which was referred to as Sideway: New York on promotional posters at the con) is part of a property developed by Fuel Entertainment, a creative house that's also working on a deal to turn the idea into a TV cartoon. They teamed up with fellow Ottawa, Ontario-based developers Playbrains to handle the development and Sony Online Entertainment to handle publishing; the PSN title will serve as an introduction to what the team hopes becomes a larger universe. That universe centers around Nox, a graffiti tagger who himself is turned into art by a rival tagger named Spray. The game sends Nox around 15 different platforming levels, each one of which is painted on the side of a building, essentially placing his 2D action in a projection on a 3D world. %Gallery-128865%
