Imagine you’re one of the best video game designers in the world. You work for Atari in 1982, when the company’s 2600 console has an over 80% share of the video game market.  You’re given a project that normally takes 6 months and asked to do it in 5 weeks. It’s going to be released worldwide. Steven Spielberg, hot off the success of his new movie E.T. is going to help sell it. It’s expected to be a bestseller, and there’s a lot of money riding on the fact that it will be. Five weeks sounds like an insane amount of time, but hey – you’re the best. You can do, right?

So you install some of the necessary equipment in your own home so you can, as you know you should, work unrealistic hours. You work to the point where the hours blur and day and night lose all meaning. You come out of your foxhole with his game, confident you pulled it off.

But then the game doesn’t sell. It doesn’t meet the outsized expectations. Atari’s stock drops like a diver, the splash violent and unmissable. From that point on, everyone will blame your 5-week mistake. The remaining copies of the game will be buried in a landfill in New Mexico. You’re out of a job – the best one you ever had – and slowly this urban myth takes on a life of its own: that your game was so bad it ended an entire juggernaut of a company in Atari. It’s so bad, they will say, the the only way to remove the stain is to bury it.

You’re Howard Scott Warshaw, and your game designer career is over. The one thing you could do better than anybody is now the worst thing you ever did.

But let’s back up: Zak Penn’s Atari: Game Over is a pretty entertaining and incredibly fascinating documentary about a central question: where exactly were all those Atari E.T. games buried? Could they possibly be dug up? But pulling on those questions reveals strands that even Penn didn’t anticipate. While part of the documentary goes to New Mexico to meet with a variety of people about where exactly this burial may have taken place, the far more interesting part is about why this urban myth needs to be answered. There are many interviews with a variety of people who know and love video games, including the co-designer of the original Microsoft X-Box, Seamus Blackley, and Earnest Cline, the writer of the best-selling and soon-to-be-adapted-into-a-movie novel Ready Player One.

The documentary takes the idea that E.T. is a game so bad it could kill the unstoppable Atari, and removes the hyperbole from the facts. No, the game didn’t kill the company. Atari ate itself with far more costly decisions than any one game. But in following the history of Atari and how it came to be so dominant (the film paints the picture: imagine X-Box and Playstation combined – that’s how big Atari was), we get to meet some of the people who built this wave in the first place. And one of the most interesting characters in all of this is Howard Scott Warshaw. It’s pretty clear this guy is incredibly talented – he’s only designed some of the best and best-selling Atari games, after all – which makes his martyrdom for the E.T. game all the more heartbreaking.

And here’s the beauty of this story: you will find yourself rooting for HSW. You might even find yourself a little choked up when HSW arrives in New Mexico, and is able to get back some of the credit he never got 33 years ago. The fans know how much of a legend he is. It gives HSW a chance to relive his glory days, reveal the dark period that followed, and then experience a beautiful, bittersweet kind of redemption when that landfill is finally opened and the truth is revealed.

Atari: Game Over is now showing on Netflix.