Best museum I have ever played.
Whether you grew up with the Atari 2600 or grew up in a world where Atari was ancient history, the company’s impact on video games, especially in the West, is immeasurable. You could argue that someone else would have carried the torch, but without Atari, video games as we know them wouldn’t exist. That history is what makes the new video game collection Atari 50 so appealing. Celebrating his 50th anniversary for the company, it features more than 80 of his games, mostly from the 1980s, to help tell the story of Atari’s rise and fall. The games themselves may not have aged very well, but their packaging is engaging and provides interesting and relevant context for why these games mattered and what their legacy is.
From the jump, Atari 50 presents its primary focus as a museum exhibit or interactive documentary. It doesn’t show up in the list of playable games. Instead, we see a list of his five timelines that tell Atari’s story, from his arcade origins to his ’90s flameout. The heart of this package is that story. The timeline is captivating and full of box art, ads, and other visuals. You can also play the game being discussed directly. Once finished, you can return to your original location on the timeline. The coolest part for me is the various interviews with Atari celebrities, from Howard Scott Warshaw, creator of Yars’ Revenge, to Tod Flye, creator of Swordquest. Their stories are engaging and full of great anecdotes and funny quotes. My personal favorite video is the one that dispels (or proves) the myth that all Atari developers were on drugs. But apart from that, it’s also cool to see Warshaw and Frye detailing the origins of their most famous work.
The Atari 50 was exactly what I wanted and left my experience with this game to give me a more complete understanding of what Atari is and why it matters. I appreciate the pioneering nature of the company more. If this were a game that had just ported his 1982 game adventure, I wouldn’t mind rolling my eyes. Instead, it provided the context of why adventures are so influential, allowing Nintendo fans to better appreciate this wonderful old game that they might call the Zelda archetype.
Aside from the 80s ambitions and knowledge of how groundbreaking some of these games were, I don’t think many of these games will be all that good in 2022. This is the best they’ve ever played since they came out. Playing Asteroids, Centipede, and Basketbrawl is nice, but it’s more of a curiosity than me immersing myself in for hours. Even his 90s games on Atari’s handheld Lynx and eventual home console Jaguar aren’t all that great. Atari Karts is a cute kart racer, Ninja Golf is an outrageous concept, and Cybermorph is a decent shooter, but overall, the games are littered with games that are more interesting than good.
The best part of the game selection is the handful of reimagined titles newly created for this collection.Vctr Sctr is a loving pastiche of Atari’s vector graphics games and the only addition to Battlezone. contains a reference to For those of you who don’t know, Battlezone is a classic Atari game, owned by another company, so unfortunately it’s not here. Several notable games actually don’t appear here due to licensing issues, and another of his Reimagined games is Haunted Houses. It’s a voxel take on an early survival horror game that’s incredibly fun to play with. SwordQuest: Airworld was his fourth planned game in the series and was never made, but the team at Digital Eclipse used his 40-year-old notes to develop his tetralogy. I finished it. Yars’ Revenge Enhanced shows the quality of the original. This is because we just gave the game a fresh coat of paint, without any other changes. In general, Reimagined games excel at taking the best concepts of outdated old games and making them sing perfectly into his 21st century.
As an interactive timeline and virtual exhibit, the Atari 50 is unmatched. There is no better historical collection (only from the same developer) for context-rich stories. We hope that this style of providing historical context, rather than just presenting a list of games from 40 years ago without explanation, will be the trend for packages like this going forward. Not that I’m a bit choosy to play RealSports Football, but I’m thrilled to know its place in Atari’s epic history.
