Universal Pictures has acquired the movie rights to ten classic Atari games: Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Yars' Revenge. The deal was first reported by Deadline and confirmed by Engadget on July 23, 2026.

Universal had already bought a screenplay — a script written on speculation, before any studio asked for it — built around one of the ten games. Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe wrote that script. The studio's existing investment in it likely led to the broader deal. Guymon Casady at Entertainment 360 is attached to produce.

Atari Chairman and CEO Wade Rosen confirmed the partnership in a statement to Deadline, saying the company is excited to work with Universal and Entertainment 360 to bring Atari's brand and games to a new medium. The Engadget coverage points back to Deadline's reporting and does not cite an Atari press release or a separate Universal statement.

These ten games come from Atari's arcade and home console catalog of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some are pure action games with almost no story: Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Missile Command, and Breakout are built around simple mechanics like rotating a spaceship, rolling a trackball, or moving a paddle. Others have a bit more to work with. Adventure, released for the Atari 2600 in 1980, is widely cited as one of the earliest games to feature a quest with items to collect and a hidden secret tucked inside by its programmer (Warren Robinett's Easter egg). Yars' Revenge, also a 2600 title, has a more defined setting and backstory. Crystal Castles and Berzerk fall in between, with named characters and a basic story frame.

This is not Universal's first attempt at Atari. The studio previously acquired movie rights to Asteroids in 2009, according to The Hollywood Reporter. No film was ever produced from that deal.

The long gap between the 2009 Asteroids deal and this one points to a real challenge. These early games were designed around simple, repeating gameplay and abstract visuals, not characters, dialogue, or plot. A screenplay based on Asteroids or Pong has to invent almost its entire story from scratch. The game gives you a setting and an action, not a narrative. That is very different from adapting a modern big-budget video game, which already has cinematic scenes, defined characters, and a built-in story arc. Studios have historically found that gap hard to bridge.

The inclusion of Adventure and Yars' Revenge in the package hints at one possible approach. Both games, despite their age, contain more story material than the abstract arcade titles. Adventure's quest structure, with its keys, castles, and enemies, fits a movie narrative more naturally than a paddle-and-ball game. Whether the Reilly-Hampe script focuses on one of these titles or on one of the simpler arcade games is not specified in the reported facts.

The deal also comes during a broader wave of video game adaptations for film and television, several of which have shown that the format can work when the source material is treated as a starting point rather than a strict blueprint. Whether Atari's catalog, built on minimalism and abstraction, can make that jump is the central question for the project.

For Atari, the partnership fits a pattern under Rosen's leadership of licensing the company's classic games across multiple media. The ten titles are among the most recognizable names in early video game history, and the film rights give Universal access to properties that many people recognize even if they never played the originals.

No production timeline, director, or cast attachments beyond the named producer and screenwriters have been reported. The deal is a rights acquisition and a script purchase, not an approved production.