Atari's 'Missile Command' Movie Still Coming, 'Centipede' In The Works Now, Too

Last summer, the sci-fi comedy Pixels brought a bunch of 1980s video games to the big screen, but they were just aliens disguised as 8-bit characters hellbent on destroying the planet. Now two famous video games from Atari are in the process of getting feature film adaptations of their own, hopefully without Adam Sandler to ruin them.

Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films has just teamed up with Atari to produce and finance two movies based on their popular 80s arcade titles Centipede and Missile Command. That's right, previously established brand names keep reigning supreme in Hollywood.

Deadline was the first to report on the Atari games being developed for the big screen with Stephen Belafonte, Wayne Marc Godfrey and Robert Jones on board as executive producers. They're not exactly the first Atari titles that come to mind as far as feature film adaptations are concerned, but that doesn't really matter.

A Missile Command movie was previously in the works as a movie at Fox back in 2011, but it appears that project never made any progress, which is why it's coming back around again. However, this is the first time Centipede has been revealed for development into its own movie, though the game was one of the prominent titles featured in Pixels last year. The only problem (which could also be seen as an advantage) is that neither of these games really have a story.

Missile Command has players controlling weapons stations tasked with defending six California cities from missiles falling from the sky and Centipede had the player controlling a single shooter scrolling left to right and blasting upward at centipedes, spiders and other bugs descending through a field of mushrooms from above. Both games have been updated for consoles and computers over the years with new graphics, so they're not entirely unrecognizable to generations who didn't grow up with arcades.

The lack of a story didn't stop Battleship from becoming a real movie, but we all know how that movie turned out. It's not hard to imagine Centipede as some kind of action fantasy with a village forced to protect itself from a giant critter infestation. But Missile Command sounds like it would need to be a movie like The Sum of All Fears. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter because these will mostly be original stories that just happen to have the recognizable title of an old video game.

Of course, the companies behind these projects couldn't be more thrilled as Atari's CEO Fred Chesnais said they are "hrilled to partner with Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films to develop feature films based on two of our most beloved titles. Centipede and Missile Command are part of Atari's unparalleled and rich library of popular games and we cannot wait to see the movies come to life."

We'll have to wait and see if these projects actually come to fruition or not. After all, an Asteroids movie has been in the works since as far back as 2009, and while it has emerged here and there with updates over the years, there's been no solid development since the project was first revealed. Stay tuned.