Documentary on buried E.T. cartridges to air on Xbox in 2014
Xbox Entertainment Studios, remember them… you know that studio that is working on “true interactive content’ for the Xbox brand… no? Okay that studio that is working on the Halo show with Stephen Spielberg, yeh those guys. Well today they announced a series of original documentaries that will air on Xbox next year. The series will focus on the biggest moments and people from the digital age.
The first of the documentaries will focus on what is perhaps the biggest legend/myth within the game’s industry; the infamous copies of E.T. that were buried in a New Mexico desert. Filming of the documentary begins in January and will focus on both the excavation of the burial site and the events that lead to the dumping of thousands of games.
The whole series of documentaries is being made in partnership with Lightbox, the new multimedia company formed by Simon Chinn and Jonathan Chinn, who have previously worked on Searching for Sugar Man, Man on Wire, 30 Day’s and American High. The pair had this to say about the joint venture.
“Our collaboration with Xbox offers an unparalleled opportunity to make a unique series of films around the extraordinary events and characters that have given rise to the digital age,”
“Our goal is to produce a series of compelling and entertaining docs which will deploy all the narrative techniques of Simon’s and my previous work. It’s particularly exciting to be partnering with filmmakers like Zak Penn who come to this process from other filmmaking disciplines and who will bring their own distinctive creative vision to this,”
Zak Penn who has previously worked on films such as X-Men 2 and The Avengers is directing the E.T. documentary that will be available in all countries with Xbox Live in 2014.
