It's fitting that the whole thing was inspired, however tortuously, by a Steven Spielberg movie. Because, when I play it out in my imagination, it feels like a Steven Spielberg movie. Like the beginning of one of the older films, where the spirit of 1970s cinema is clear to see, where the early scenes are hectic and confusing and filled with overlapping chatter.
It's Alamogordo, New Mexico, and out of the dust clouds come diggers. Then come men in face masks and hard hats, followed by film crews, by sun-startled executives. Spielberg would have done wonders with a figure like Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb - the suit who's dressed himself up as a binman today just for the cameras. I can see him peeling off his glinting aviators in practised wonderment as the first broken cartridges come out of the ground. He's holding one delicately. He's turning it over in his hands.
This is ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, the legendary Atari disaster which has just been dug up in the desert where the company that made it buried the evidence after the whole thing turned out to be a dog. You've possibly read a lot of conflicting things about it since then. That the game alone caused the death of Atari and sent the entire industry to sleep for years. That the game was the fall guy for broken business practices and it actually wasn't too bad. That the game's a full-blown masterpiece, that it was never truly buried at all, and that it wasn't then subsequently disinterred a few days ago - and that Major Nelson's hard hat has been Photoshopped onto him in the pictures.
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