Xbox Announces Original Documentary Series

Xbox Entertainment Studios announced that it is developing a multi-film documentary series with producers Simon Chinn (“Searching for Sugar Man” and “Man on Wire”) and Jonathan Chinn (FX’s “30 Days” and PBS’s “American High”), through their recently announced multi-platform media company, Lightbox.

The first installment in the series will investigate the events surrounding the great video game burial of 1983. The Atari Corporation faced with overwhelmingly negative response to “ET the Video Game,” buried millions of unsold game cartridges in the middle of the night, in the small town of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Filmmaker and avid gamer Zak Penn (X-Men 2, Avengers, Incident at Loch Ness) will direct. This episode will not only document the excavation, it will also place the urban legend of the burial in the context of the precipitous rise and fall of Atari itself.

Shooting begins in January and the series will air exclusively on Xbox One and Xbox 360 in 2014.