Atari signs deal to turn Pong, Centipede, Asteroids, and more classic games into movies

WTF?! As movie adaptations of video games have turned from mostly box-office bombs into commercial hits, it seems studios are now trawling the entire history of gaming for ideas. In what sounds like a particularly bewildering move, Atari has signed a deal with Universal Pictures to give 10 of the company’s classic games the movie treatment, including Pong and Centipede.

Atari’s retro games aren’t the first that come to mind when you think of titles that would be great on the big screen. The full list consists of Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong and Yars’ Revenge.

Deadline writes that Universal has already bought the first project based on an Atari IP, though it never revealed which one. It will be produced by Entertainment 360’s Guymon Casady from a screenplay by Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe.

“The best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest,” Casady said. “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.”

It’s certainly difficult to imagine how some of these games will translate into movies, but one expects there will be plenty of artistic interpretation. Perhaps Pong will be a Marty Supreme-style tale of becoming a table tennis champion. Missile Command could be a Cold War action thriller. Centipede might become a horror movie (nothing like The Human Centipede, presumably ). And Breakout could be a Shawshank Redemption-like prison-break tale.

The idea is to use the Atari IP to create large-scale action adventures, apparently. Hopefully, they’ll be better than that other “how could this be turned into a movie?” debacle, 2012’s Battleship.

Check out the latest Resident Evil trailer, a video game adaptation that appears to do the source material justice

Universal had previously secured the rights for an adaptation of Asteroids in 2019, but it still hasn’t been made into a movie. One assumes this would be an intergalactic adventure with aliens and a lot of threatening rock/metallic/icy space bodies.

Atari’s retro titles aren’t the only old games Hollywood is plundering for big-screen adaptations. Point-and-click classic Broken Sword, which first arrived in the mid-1990s, will also get a movie version, and it’s being made by the studio behind the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movies.

Video game movies have come a long way since the days of Super Mario Bros in 1993 and the painfully awful Alone in the Dark. There are still a few stinkers, but when A Minecraft Movie made almost $1 billion, it’s easy to see why studios are desperate to make more.