The Internet is full of hatred and bile-spewing comments about video games. Hell, I'm guilty of it myself. If you shelled out money for the Duke Nukem Forever: Balls of Steel Edition, you're entitled to throw out a couple of curse words in front of someone's children at a Best Buy, too.
The most famous video game comment maker on the Internet is The Angry Video Game Nerd, a character creation of filmmaker James Rolfe who became famous for his obscenity laden diatribes about the worst classic games ever to be shoved into a game console's orifice. The fans he built up through his YouTube channel and his presence on local game production outfits like ScrewAttack have been clamoring for him and his friends to put the pen-pack wearing, Rolling Rock-chugging character in an epic adventure to review the undisputed worst video game of all time. He and his crew have finally done just that and it's on its way to Dallas.
Rolfe announced on his Cinemasscre Productions website that the movie will start a tour of screenings that includes the Magnolia Theater on Thursday, August 7, and the screening is already sold out. The string of screenings will open on July 21 with an official premiere at Grauman's Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles followed by a panel and screening on July 24 at the San Diego Comic-Con.
The movie stars Rolfe as his signature character, who embarks on an epic quest to review the video game version of E.T. for the Atari 2600, a legendary pioneer in the annals of bad game making. The game was rushed into production in 1982 to coincide with the release of Steven Spielberg's famous family movie about a young boy who befriends an adorable alien stranded on Earth. Atari shelled out a lot of money for the license and only had five weeks to complete the game with a staff of three programmers insane enough to take on such a challenge. The game was so bad and sold so poorly that, according to rumor, Atari tried to bury its mistake by shipping 14 truckloads of unsold E.T. cartridges to a New Mexico landfill. This spring, a crew of excavators confirmed the rumor by digging up part of the landfill where they found thousands of copies of the game, some of which still worked.
The AVGN's epic quest becomes a road movie when the Nerd decides to travel to the same New Mexico landfill, dig up the burial site and prove once and for all that it's just an urban legend. Along the way, he'll have to deal with zombies, robots, a military general with a mini-tank for legs, projectile vomiting and (worst of all) skills that were only useful in the horrid NES remake of Top Gun.
