Atari Signs a 10-Game Movie Deal With Universal, and the First Script Is Already Written

Here is a sentence we did not expect to write this year: a Pong movie is now a real possibility. Atari has signed a deal with Universal Pictures that hands the studio the film rights to 10 of its classic games, and Universal has already bought a finished screenplay based on one of them. Which one? Neither company will say, which is either a fun mystery or a very on-brand piece of Hollywood teasing, depending on your mood.

The lineup reads like a tour of the arcade era: Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong and Yars' Revenge. The stated goal is big-scale action-adventure movies built on those names.

Who is actually making these

The first script comes from Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe, and it was that spec screenplay that reportedly kicked the whole partnership off. Guymon Casady of Entertainment 360 is producing, with Reilly and Hampe attached as producers too. Casady summed up the pitch nicely, saying the best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest.

Atari chairman and CEO Wade Rosen leaned on the heritage angle, pointing out that the company has spent more than five decades making games that stayed part of popular culture long after their original release. That is true, and it is also the whole bet here. Nobody is buying a ticket for the plot of Breakout, because Breakout does not have one. They would be buying the name, the vibe and whatever world the filmmakers build around it.

Our take

We can see why Universal wants this. Video game movies have gone from punchline to money printer in a few short years, and a library of instantly recognizable names with almost no established lore is a screenwriter's dream. There is no canon to break when your source material is a triangle shooting rocks.

That said, some healthy skepticism is warranted. Universal has held Asteroids movie rights before, all the way back in 2009, and no film ever materialized. A purchased script is the very first step of a very long pipeline, and plenty of announced adaptations never make it out of development. Ten properties on paper does not mean ten movies on screens, and we would honestly be pleased if even two of these get made.

Still, as retro revivals go, this one costs players nothing and might produce something genuinely fun. If the mystery first script turns out to be Missile Command as a tense cold war thriller, or Adventure as a fantasy quest where the hero is inevitably chased by a duck-shaped dragon, we will be in the theater. Just please, somebody, resist the urge to make the Pong paddles talk.