Universal and Atari team up on 10 classic games, including Pong movie reboot

Universal is bouncing back toward Pong, and it is not doing it quietly. According to Deadline, Universal entered a 10-property development deal with Atari built around Atari’s intellectual property that still lives in people’s heads 50 years later. The list is both specific and very Gen X-coded: Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Yars’ Revenge.

The headline challenge here is simple: can you turn arcade and 2600-era games into movies that feel like something more than a title card? Universal’s framing, per the same report, is “big-scale action-adventure fare,” with a moving platform launching and/or bouncing balls at other platforms. And while the studio did not specify which title lands first, it is reportedly excited about a spec script from Matt Reilly, a former Universal executive turned screenwriter, and Carl Hampe, a former producer turned screenwriter.

If you are an executive, the interesting part is less “Pong the movie” as a punchline, and more “Hollywood just figured out what audiences want.” That is the logic the A.V. Club starts with, pointing at how, after about 30 years of “fucking up video game movies,” studios got their groove back by giving audiences exactly what they want. The piece cites Minecraft and two Super Mario movies as examples that grossed at least a billion dollars. It then draws the distinction between audience segments: Minecraft’s performance is attributed to genuine interest from younger audiences, while Illumination’s Mario movies are framed as benefiting from nostalgic parents bringing their kids to see Toad on the silver screen.

Universal’s Atari deal reads like an attempt to reproduce the second recipe, nostalgia plus family theater. Atari’s library is old enough that it can play as cultural background radiation. But the A.V. Club also flags why that is not an automatic win: few of these games have enjoyed long lives after the Atari 2600. Many were ported to other consoles and repackaged in retro and vintage games collections, but that is a different kind of staying power than a sustained mainstream narrative people feel they need to watch.

Now consider the adaptation trap Hollywood keeps falling into. The A.V. Club points out that some “worst imaginable video game movie” labels did not survive contact with the actual movie. Tetris is the example. The argument is that even when a game seems unadaptable, the film version sidestepped gameplay and became a political thriller about the attempt to license the game during the Cold War. That matters for Universal because it suggests the path is not literal level design to live action. Instead, it is taking the recognizable “shape” of a property and rebuilding meaning around it.

So, how does that translate to Atari’s most prominent names in the deal? Pong is the obvious nostalgia magnet, but “big-scale action-adventure” is a high bar. The A.V. Club calls a “big-scale action-adventure Pong,” with platforms launching and balls bouncing, a tall order. That is not just a creative concern. It is a risk management concern. If the film leans too hard into visual novelty without the emotional engine that carries audiences through a two-hour runtime, the result will feel like a screensaver with producers.

The same problem shows up, in the piece’s view, for other titles. It mentions that 1980’s Adventure, with the A.V. Club’s slightly brutal description of it looking like a placeholder on a poster, is hard to imagine adapting as-is. And yet the article basically shrugs at the idea that low initial adaptability means the story cannot be built. It asks, “who knows,” about Reilly and Hampe having “a really good take” on Yars’ Revenge. Importantly, the A.V. Club does not claim what that take is, or that any specific title is first. What it does make clear is that Universal is grounding this bet in writing development, specifically with a spec script team that includes Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe.

For executives, this is where the second-order implications show up. A 10-property deal is not just a creative bet, it is a portfolio strategy. Studios can hedge by spreading across multiple properties, but the market will still judge them as a unit if the first release disappoints. Also, nostalgia is a renewable resource, but only if the translation feels earned. Kids might show up because they recognize the game name, but parents are the ones who decide whether it becomes an outing, not an argument in the car. If Universal’s “big-scale action-adventure” concept can be made to work in a way that does not require literal gameplay, the same approach could turn the rest of the list into a broader slate.

The strategic stake is not just “will Pong work.” It is whether Universal and Atari can make classic mechanics into scalable movie language, and whether the industry’s new willingness to bet on game IP is durable or just a brief nostalgia rush. For peers, the takeaway is straightforward: the bar is no longer “can this be adapted,” but “can we adapt it without turning it into a novelty museum exhibit.” Universal’s Atari deal, with Pong at the center of the cultural imagination and Reilly and Hampe behind the spec development, is a test of whether Hollywood’s next wave of game movies can deliver both brand recognition and narrative gravity.