Movies made into bad video games

In this episode of Critical Hit on JOY FM, Luke, Kev and Phil discuss popular movies that were turned into bad video games. Films mentioned include Wayne's World (Penelope Spheeris, USA, 1992), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, USA, 1990) and Home Alone (Chris Columbus, USA, 1990).

Phil then recounts the story behind the notorious Atari cartridge game based on ET the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1982).

Faced with millions of unsold cartridges of the unsuccessful ET game, Atari was said to have arranged for truckloads of the cartridges and game systems to be buried in a landfill site in New Mexico.

Over 30 years later, the site was excavated for the documentary Atari: Game Over (Zak Penn, USA, 2014). While more than 1,000 game cartridges were recovered, of various titles including ET, Atari later verified they had buried around 700,000 cartridges in 1983.

Critical Hit was a regular gaming segment on JOY 94.9, Australia's first LGBTQI+ community radio station.