Launched in 1977, the Atari 2600 console was a sales phenomenon, capturing the US market and forming the early foundations of a multi-million dollar industry. Howard Scott Warshaw was one of the company’s brightest young engineers, and his first game, Yars’ Revenge, was hailed as one of the very finest games available for the system. But Atari’s meteoric rise would soon lead to an equally precipitous fall.

A gigantic sum of money (around $22m) was spent on acquiring the license for a tie-in game based on Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. By the time the deal was made, Warshaw had just five weeks to get the game finished in time for its release at Christmas in 1982. Atari was pinning a literal fortune on a game put together in a rush, and expected it to sell millions of cartridges.

Through a series of lively interviews with such familiar figures as former videogame journalist turned Star Wars screenwriter Gary Whitta, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, and Joe Lewandowski, the garbage contractor leading the hunt for the buried cartridges, Atari: Game Over paints a brief yet compelling portrait of the games industry’s early years.

The Atari era was one of hubris and questionable business practices, but also creative ingenuity. Through contributions from Bushnell, Warshaw and also Emanuel Gerard – who was then executive vice president at Atari’s owner, Warner – we learn that Atari was very much the prototypical Silicon Valley company, with an informal, lively working culture that would soon be taken up (in somewhat less excessive form) by such giants as Microsoft and Google.

If there’s one important thing to be taken away from Atari: Game Over, it’s that history has placed too much weight on the role E.T. played in Atari’s downfall – to the detriment of Warshaw, who was clearly a talented designer. Even faced with an absurdly short time in which to make E.T., he didn’t want to simply churn out a Pac-Man clone, as suggested by Spielberg; instead, he tried to create an adventure game that tapped into the key story elements in Spielberg’s film. Time constraints meant that E.T. couldn’t live up to the ambition Warshaw had for it, but the game was by no means the worst piece of software available for the Atari 2600 – and certainly not the company-killer it’s sometimes accused of being.