A new documentary series centered on technological events and milestones will be aired exclusively on Xbox Live starting next year with the premiere film investigating the buried Atari E.T cartridge legend.
Series creator Xbox Entertainment Studios said it is working with producers Simon Chinn and Jonathan Chin, through their new multi-platform media company Lightbox, to produce the still-unnamed series that will focus on how technology changed the world.
"Jonathan and Simon Chinn are the perfect team to spearhead this series for Xbox. They are consummate story tellers and they plan to match their creative sensibility with the best talent in the industry," said Xbox Entertainment Studios President Nancy Tellem. "These stories will expose how the digital revolution created a global democracy of information, entertainment and commerce, and how it impacts our lives every day."
The first film of the series will investigate the story of the landfill where Atari supposedly buried the remains of millions of unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game 30 years ago. The Atari 2600 game E.T, which was rushed to the market in 1982, was allegedly so bad that Atari was left with truckloads of unsold copies that it reportedly buried in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the middle of the night.
Earlier this year, multimedia studio Fuel Entertainment obtained permission from the New Mexico City Commission to explore the Alamogordo landfill. It appears the company approached Xbox for the documentary after it got the go signal for the excavation process.
"We are thrilled to be working with Xbox Entertainment Studios and Lightbox in connection with this project," Mike Burns, CEO of Fuel Entertainment said in a press statement. "As an innovator in cross-platform entertainment, it has long been our dream to uncover this mystery and bring it to life on the screen."
The episode will be directed by filmmaker and writer Zak Penn whose works include X-Men: The Last Stand and The Avengers alongside Joss Whedon. Shooting for the series will begin in January next year. The films will be shown exclusively on Xbox 360 and Xbox One and will be available worldwide in all markets that support Xbox Live.
