In the late 70s and early 80s, ET phoned home on Atari 2600 and became the video game that New Media magazine later described as having toppled a billion dollar industry. We know the industry rose again as a pale, commercial version of its old self, but… did you ever wonder what it was like back in the wild days when the titans of gaming clashed, not on Wall Street, but inside the minds of designers? Want to learn first hand how the barren valley south of The Bay gave birth to cult celebrity that died as quickly as it was born? Take the ride with the folks who made it happen. Walk on walls, smoke the evil weed, and plunge head first into the uncharted (undocumented) world that was game production back in the bad old days.

The Xbox Originals documentary that chronicles the fall of the Atari Corporation through the lens of one of the biggest mysteries of all time, dubbed “The Great Video Game Burial of 1983.” Rumor claims that millions of returned and unsold E.T. cartridges were buried in the desert, but what really happened there?

Before Google, Yahoo and even Apple, before the Silicon Valley cliché of informal dress code, skateboards running the corridors and wild creativity became commonplace, one company embodied the digital economy lifestyle and business style: the one firm coming out of the Age of Aquarius was Atari. The story of Atari is two-thirds the story of Nolan Bushnell, founder and visionary, and one-third the first and probably biggest boom and bust of the new economy some 20 years before the new economy even existed. Atari was showing that technology is cool, way before the personal computer revolution took place and they were reaching out to an ever-growing audience with something that is still cool today: video games. Atari literally introduced the digital world to the mass consciousness.

虽然新东西层出不穷，但总有人怀旧，一些有历史的作品仍然会被时不时提起，甚至有些作品会以重制版和复刻版的形式再度出现在新一代的玩家面前。如果你想了解或重温现代电子游戏的起源和发展，Netflix的新纪录片《High Score》应该值得期待。
纪录片将致力于展现上世纪90年代游戏的“黄金时代”，其中会提及玩家们耳熟能详的任天堂、世嘉、《太空侵略者》《最终幻想》《街头霸王2》《真人快打》等。创作这些划时代作品的计算机高手与艺术家也会出镜，讲述创造力是如何相互融合，几乎在偶然间建立了电子游戏这一产业。