Xbox Entertainment Studios may have shut down with several key projects discontinued – which included Halo: The TV Series and Humans – but some shows managed to survive the purge. One of those is Halo: Nightfall which will debut alongside Halo: The Master Chief Collection when it releases on November 11th worldwide. The other is Atari: Game Over, a documentary centred on the downfall of Atari releasing on November 20th through Xbox Live.

Of course it’s not just about Atari but about E.T., the most infamous bad game in the history of bad games. E.T. performed so badly that it brought Atari down with it – in fact, it was so bad that thousands of copies of the game had to be buried in a landfill in New Mexico because customers simply wanted nothing to do with it.

The documentary actually sees the crew heading to New Mexico to find said landfill and you can even hear from designer Howard Scott Warshaw about its overall impact on the industry. Check it out in the coming weeks.

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After the announcement that Xbox Entertainment Studios, devoted to creating original programming for Microsoft’s Xbox One console, would be shutting down, the division has finally been shut down today as Nancy Tellam and Jordan Levin left the company. It’s interesting because according to Variety, there were 3000 lay-offs from Microsoft but Tellam and Jordan were expected to say on.

That pretty much puts any chances of saving existing projects like Halo: The TV Series and Humans, an English adaptation of the popular Swedish television drama. As of now, the only live-action original programming to be released is Halo: Nightfall which will debut alongside Halo: The Master Chief Collection this November on the Xbox One. A subsequent episode will release each week for the show and establish the events leading into Halo 5: Guardians.

What are your thoughts on Xbox Entertainment Studios shutting down, especially given the initial strong push for the same? Let us know below.

A month or so ago, we got news that Microsoft would be shuttering its Xbox Entertainment Studios, thus putting an end to the sorry saga of their experimentation with Xbox exclusive media that started over a year ago, when they famously debuted the console with the message ‘TV! TV! TV!’

Although some in house TV related projects still continue at Microsoft (such as the Halo TV series, or the live action sequences in Quantum Break), most of Microsoft’s TV related projects are now suspended. The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Microsoft is looking at selling its Xbox Entertainment Studios to Warner Bros.

If that happened, it is unclear if Warner Bros. would just inherit the infrastructure of the studio, or also the IPs that the studio owns- notably, Microsoft’s Xbox properties. If they inherit the IPs, they would also be free to bring media based on them to any platform they want, including Nintendo’s Wii U and Sony’s PlayStation 4.

Stay tuned for more coverage at any rate.

Microsoft announced a massive 18,000 lay-offs yesterday for its Nokia Devices and Services division and while there were “minor” changes to the Xbox division, it mostly resulted in the closure of Xbox Entertainment Studios which was responsible for bringing original TV content to the Xbox One. Remember Xbox Originals? Yeah, that’s gone now.

However, some projects will carry on as planned in the mean time, one of them being Remedy’s Quantum Break which mixes video game storylines with a live action TV series. The show is still on track as a Microsoft representative told Polygon that Quantum Break “will be released next year and the game and show both remain on track.

“The news of Xbox Entertainment Studios has not impacted our progress and we’re excited to share more details of Quantum Break at Gamescom in August.”

Other projects that survived the purge include Halo: Nightfall, Halo the TV Series and much more. What else lies in store for Microsoft? We’ll find out in the coming months.

Rapper Nas will be receiving his own TV show Street Dreams according to Xbox Entertainment Studios. The series will apparently explore the life of the man and be set in the 90s in the Queensbridge housing complex in Long Island. It will consist of half-hour long episodes and celebrate Nas’s the 20th anniversary of Illmatic.

The series will apparently look at Nas’s difficulties in trying to break into the rap industry, and will have Nas himself providing new music. The series is being handled by Electric City Entertainment. It has the same team that created The Place Beyond The Pines with 50/50 scriptwriter Jonathan Levine handling directorial and writing duties.

The album Illmatic will also be seeing a reissue and is often looked at as a landmark rap title for East Coast hip hop and remains one of the most critically acclaimed albums till date. Looking forward to a show on Nas when he was trying to make his way to the top? Let us know below.

Xbox Entertainment Studios, in collaboration with some big names in the motion picture industry, are teaming up to offer an all new Xbox exclusive documentary series, the first “episode” of which will chronicle the history of the Atari system.

“Our collaboration with Xbox offers an unparalleled opportunity to make a unique series of films around the extraordinary events and characters that have given rise to the digital age,” said Simon Chinn (Searching for Sugar Man and Man on Wire).

Jonathan Chinn (FX’s 30 Days and PBS’s American High) added,“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. 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.”

Nancy Tellen, the president of Xbox Entertainment Studios offered a comment as well:

“Jonathan and Simon Chinn are the perfect team to spearhead this series for Xbox. They are consummate story tellers and they plan to match their creative sensibility with the best talent in the industry. These stories will expose how the digital revolution created a global democracy of information, entertainment and commerce, and how it impacts our lives every day.”