I don’t know why this little piece of news delights me so, but it does. I mean, here we are in the age of the Nintendo Wii, and I can still remember it like it was yesterday:
It was Christmas, and my brother and I unwrapped an Atari console amidst whoops and hollers. We spent the remainder of the day playing Pong, Tank, and also a game I think was called Adventure (oh, it was! Here it is!). We thought we were the luckiest and coolest kids around.
I tried to explain Space Invaders to my son the other day and he just stared at me blankly for a while. Then he rallied and started peppering me with questions. Can you fly? (No.) Can you get new weapons? (No.) Well, can you set off a special shield or pass through to a secret level? (No and no.) Finally he gave up and said that maybe I just don’t like games all that much, because that sounded boring.
(I then made him sit through a twenty minute lecture on how I used to walk uphill both ways through the snow, barefoot, to school every day.)
Anyway, you’ll never guess who’s making a Nolan Bushnell biopic:
Leonardo DiCaprio has more fake IDs than Fletch.
The ubiquitous actor-producer has just become attached to star in “Atari,” a pitch that writers Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman sold to Paramount on Friday about the godfather of the video game industry, Nolan Bushnell. DiCaprio’s Appian Way shingle is producing the biopic, which the filmmakers hope will play with elements from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Tucker.”
Bushnell was an engineering student, puzzle-lover and game enthusiast (chess, Go, early computer games) who went from fixing broken pinball machines to launching Atari Corp., a video game manufacturer, in the early ’70s. Its first product was a little game called Pong that transfixed kids in suburban rec rooms across the country and led to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of video game sales. Within a few years, he sold the company to Warner Communications for $28 million.
During the next three decades, Bushnell started many other tech ventures and also created Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theaters.
See? Space Invaders is too interesting.
I’m labeling this “retro” even though this is one of the few times I won’t give you a long, drawn-out “when I watched this as a wee lass” sort of story to go along with an old show. Oh, sure—I grew up on Sesame Street and Superfriends and I’m only too happy to bore you with the tales of how important those shows were to me in my tender youth, but this time it’s different.
There’s always just a little bit of apprehension inherent in a favorite character from childhood being turned into a star of the big screen. Will they get the story right? Will they get the casting right? Will it be the way it should be or will they blow it?
Marvel fans will be thrilled to hear that Iron Man is coming to a cartoon near you—first on a pre-release DVD, and then as a television series later this month. But despite being as American as apple pie and, well, Marvel Comics, Iron Man is being developed for television