Game-film crossovers are a decades-old pattern predating Fortnite

Evidence

The crossover between games and traditional Hollywood and music is by no means a new phenomenon. Disney licensed Mickey Mouse to Nintendo and Atari as early as 1981, and Tron, another live-action/animation hybrid about a simulated digital world and an evil businessman, is the eighth highest-grossing arcade machine of all time, earning an estimated 45 million by 1983, over 130 million in 2022 dollars and far more than the film grossed. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was ported to Commodore 64, Amiga, and NES along with the film’s release in 1988. And, infamously, Spielberg’s E.T. is known not only for its successful product placement but also its incredibly unsuccessful Atari video game adaptation, one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history, resulting in 728,000 cartridges unceremoniously dumped into a New Mexico landfill in 1983. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 418

Categorization

• XREF: The E.T. landfill anecdote connects to the reader’s broader theme of failed derivative media deals producing waste — fits alongside the games-as-franchise-infrastructure thread.
• CANDY: The Atari E.T. cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill is a light, memorable trivia tidbit.