I Wonder Where This Reporter Is Getting Their Facts

You know when you are reading a news story and the reporter says something so ignorant that you have to wonder if they intentionally got it wrong as a slight against the thing they are writing about.

The thing that brought this question to mind for me is the opening of an article on the Studio Briefing site about the perception that the Tron sequel is going to tank at the box office later this month.

Converting a popular videogame into a movie has always been a dicey proposition. Now, reports indicate that the 3D sequel to Disney’s Tron, a movie about videogames that was released in 1982 — before such things ever arrived in the home — may find itself inheriting the failed legacy of the original.

Seriously, what the hell. We all know that is wrong.

I am not going to talk about all the individual game consoles that came out in the 1970's, you know those one game wonders and some of the also-rans.

No, I'm talking about the Atari 2600 which was out for five years before Tron was released. So I think quite a few people were familiar with having a home console. After all, they sold 30 million of those things, which is more consoles than, let's see, the original Xbox, the Gamecube, Sega's Master System, Dreamcast and Saturn. It is also only 5 million less than the Genesis and about 10 million less than the Playstation 3.

And if you asked even an 18-year old kid what the worst game ever made was, they'd be more than likely to say it was E.T. the Extra Terrestrial which came out in, wait for it... 1982. It was also one of the factors which led to the North American Video Game Crash of 1983. You can't really have an industry crash if there wasn't an industry to begin with, now can you?

OK, geek spasm over. My point is, if the reporter got that detail wrong, how can I trust them when it comes to their analysis of the movie in question? If you were reading an article about a political, sports or historical movie and they made an error like that about the context it is exploring, you would doubt the analysis of that too, wouldn't you? It makes me question their credibility, because it isn't a small mistake.