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

Universal had already purchased a spec screenplay — a script written on speculation, without a studio commission — built around one of the ten titles, written by Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe. That existing investment likely provided the foundation for the broader rights 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 attributes its reporting to Deadline's exclusive and does not cite an Atari press release or a separate Universal statement.

The ten properties span a range of Atari's arcade and console catalog from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some are action-oriented arcade titles with minimal narrative content: Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Missile Command, and Breakout are mechanically pure games built around vector graphics, trackball aiming, or paddle control. Others carry slightly more structural premise. Adventure, released for the Atari 2600 in 1980, is widely cited as one of the earliest games to feature an exploratory quest with inventory items and a hidden element (Warren Robinett's Easter egg — a secret room tucked into the game by its programmer). Yars' Revenge, also a 2600 title, has a more defined setting and backstory than its arcade stablemates. Crystal Castles and Berzerk occupy a middle ground, with named protagonists and rudimentary narrative framing.

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

The gap between the 2009 Asteroids option and the current deal is worth noting for what it reveals about the structural challenge of adapting early arcade games. These titles were designed around tight gameplay loops and visual abstraction, not characters, dialogue, or plot. A screenplay built on Asteroids or Pong has to invent nearly its entire narrative apparatus from scratch; the game supplies a setting and a verb, not a story. That is a different proposition than adapting a modern AAA title — the big-budget, story-driven games that already feature cinematic cutscenes, defined characters, and an existing narrative arc. Studios have historically struggled to bridge that gap.

The inclusion of Adventure and Yars' Revenge in the package suggests a potential strategy for managing it. Both titles, despite their age, contain more narrative raw material than the purely mechanical arcade entries. Adventure's quest structure, with its keys, castles, and enemies, maps more naturally onto a screen story than a paddle-and-ball mechanic. Whether the Reilly-Hampe spec script centers on one of these more narratively elastic titles or on one of the abstract arcade games is not specified in the reported facts.

The deal also arrives amid a broader wave of game-to-film and game-to-television adaptations, several of which have shown that the format can yield commercially and critically viable results when the source material is treated as a foundation rather than a constraint. Whether Atari's catalog, with its emphasis on minimalism and abstraction, can sustain that translation is the central question for the project.

For Atari, the partnership fits a pattern of licensing and brand-expansion efforts under Rosen's leadership that have leveraged the company's legacy IP across multiple media. The ten titles represent some of the most recognizable names in early video game history, and the film rights give Universal access to properties with significant generational recognition even among audiences who never played the originals.

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