If you’re a classic gamer, you might have known that a film for Atari’s 1986 game, Rampage is still in the works, despite script tweaks, but two older games from Atari’s heyday of quarters and feathered hair are going to hit theaters as well. Deadline announced today that both Centipede and Missile Command are the latest Atari games to be adapted for the big screen, and let’s hope they don’t take a page out of Adam Sandler’s book.
Randall Emmett and George Furla of Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films are set to produce both films, with Stephen Belafonte, Wayne Marc Godfrey, and Robert Jones in the executive producing seats. Centipede and Missile Command possibly might be the oldest video games to inspire film adaptations, unless there’s a film adaptation of Mattel’s Electronic Football that I don’t know about. Both games came out in 1980. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, the Miracle on Ice happened at Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, and the debut of MTV was still a year away.
Centipede and Missile Command were both shoot ’em up style games. In Centipede, you had to protect yourself from creepy-crawly things like spiders and centipedes (duh), and Missile Command was a product of the Cold War which focused on six California cities being bombarded by missiles with the player trying to protect them. Both plots have some great potential as sci-fi films, but again, please don’t be like Pixels.
(Via Deadline)
