Xbox Entertainment Studios will next year debut an original documentary series exclusively on Xbox, and shooting will begin next month.
The series will be produced by two-time Academy Award winning producer Simon Chinn (Searching for Sugar Man and Man on Wire) and Emmy winning producer Jonathan Chinn (FX’s 30 Days and PBS’s American High) through their new multi-platform media company, Lightbox.
Producer’s Simon and Jonathan Chinn stated:
Simon: 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.
Jonathan: 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,
Nancy Tellem, president, Xbox Entertainment Studios also added:
Jonathan and Simon Chinn are the perfect team to spearhead this series for Xbox. They are consummate story tellers and they plan to match their creative sensibility with the best talent in the industry, These stories will expose how the digital revolution created a global democracy of information, entertainment and commerce, and how it impacts our lives every day.
The exclusive series will come investigating 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. The series will be directed by Zak Penn (X-Men 2, Avengers, Incident at Loch Ness). This episode will not only document the excavation, but place the urban legend of the burial in the context of the precipitous rise and fall of Atari itself. Zak Penn himself also stated:
When Simon and Jonathan Chinn approached me about this story, I knew it would be something important and fascinating, I wasn’t expecting to be handed the opportunity to uncover one of the most controversial mysteries of gaming lore.
Are you looking forward to the Documentary Series? Let us know via the comment section below.
