In February last year, we blogged about Atari’s plans to sell the movie rights to retro action classic Missile Command, and today Variety is reporting it actually happened. And not only that: Missile Command now also has an executive producer, a person called Jim Wilson (who became Atari’s CEO just last week).
The game from 1980 will be turned into a movie by writers Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama (who haven’t accomplished that much yet if their IMDb resumes are to be believed). In the game, players must protect six cities on their home planet “Zardon” against evil invaders from “Krytol”.
20th Century Fox and a company called Chernin Entertainment are the studios behind the project. Atari already sold the movie rights for Asteroids to Universal and for Rollercoaster Tycoon to Sony Pictures.
A similar project is Battleship, a movie that’s based on the game of the same name and is to star Liam Neeson and Rihanna (due out in 2012).