At Microsoft’s big Xbox One announcement this summer, the company chose to focus on its new console as a multimedia machine and heavily promoted the use of the device to watch TV. Though Microsoft’s marketing message has shifted slightly toward gamers in recent months, the company is still intent on making its Xbox consoles great devices to watch TV through.
Today Microsoft announced that it will be releasing a new documentary series on Xbox consoles next year. The series will be produced by Xbox Entertainment Studios in cooperation with Simon Chinn (producer for Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man) and Jonathan Chinn (producer on TV show 30 Days). The documentaries will debut first exclusively on Xbox One and Xbox 360 consoles.
The first documentary will be on about a famous legend in the gaming industry. In 1983 Atari Corporation allegedly buried millions of unsold Atari console cartridges in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill. The documentary will take a look at a new excavation on the site, settling decades-old questions about what Atari really buried at the site.
Shooting on the series will begin in January and the first episodes will be available sometime in 2014. Zak Penn, a screenwriter on movies such as Elektra and X-Men: The Last Stand has been tapped to direct the Atari landfill episode.
“Our goal is to produce a series of compelling and entertaining docs which will deploy all the narrative techniques of Simon’s and my previous work,” said Jonathan Chinn. “It’s particularly exciting to be partnering with filmmakers like Zak Penn who come to this process from other filmmaking disciplines and who will bring their own distinctive creative vision to this.”