Atari 50 (subtitled The Anniversary Celebration) is a video game compilation and interactive documentary about the history of Atari. It comprises newly shot interviews with former Atari employees, archival footage, emulated games from the company's catalog, and six new games inspired by past Atari games. It was developed by Digital Eclipse and released on Atari VCS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in 2022, the 50th anniversary of Atari's founding. The main feature of the game is a five-part interactive timeline that lays out the history of the company and its products through video, scanned artifacts and related games.[3]
Critics have compared Atari 50 favorably to a museum or traditional documentary.[3][4][5] They praised its thoroughness and hoped other developers would receive a similar treatment.[3] Digital Eclipse announced that they would be producing more "interactive documentary" compilations in the style of Atari 50 under the Gold Master Series with The Making of Karateka (2023) and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story (2024).
Content
Atari 50 compiles 109 video games made for arcades, standalone handhelds, and game consoles, specifically Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar.[6][7][8][9] Each of the original games is given a single save state. Controls can be remapped, and a CRT-like filter can be enabled, while bezels recreate art and fill out the wide screen.[4] Some games feature further enhancements, such as Star Raiders, which has overlays that show player status and rumble effects when entering hyperspace.[10]
Six new "Atari Reimagined" games were created for the collection by Digital Eclipse staff.[11][12] These games are updated versions of Atari's games, such as Yars' Revenge Reimainged, which reuses the code of Yars' Revenge with more special effects and audio, while VCTR-SCTR is a completely new game inspired by vector graphics games like Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Battlezone, Speed Freak, and Tempest.[12][8]
The game has a interactive timeline presenting the history of Atari.[6] It is split into five categories: "Arcade Origins", "Birth of the Console", "Highs and Lows", "The Dawn of PCs", and "The 1990s and Beyond".[13] It covers Atari's origin in the 1970s, its first home console released in the 1970s, Atari just before and after the video game crash of 1983, its home computer line and its console releases in the 1990s.[14]
The timeline includes archival material such as design documents, game manuals, context for games, contemporary quotes and video interviews with game creators.[8] Atari employees and former employees are interviewed in the collection, including Allan Alcorn, Owen Rubin, David Crane, Jerry Jessop, Bill Rehbock, Tod Frye, Eugene Jarvis, Howard Scott Warshaw, Nolan Bushnell and Wade Rosen, as well as other members of the game industry such as Cliff Bleszinski, Tim Schafer, and Ed Fries.[15][16] The games included can also be browsed through a list as in most retro collections.[17]
Development
Atari 50 features an interactive timeline (pictured) which presents text, images, video footage and playable games to form a narrative of the history of Atari.
The game's editorial director, Chris Kohler, joined Digital Eclipse in 2020 following the departure of Frank Cifaldi. The team were working on a re-release of Jordan Mechner's Karateka (1984), which Kohler described as being in a "different sort of prototype and in a different sort of state" than what would become The Making of Karateka (2023). Kohler went through Mechner's journals he kept while in college, discovering that the material could be used to chronologically tell the history of game's development. He wanted to place the game's history in a timeline, showcasing earlier games developed by the creator and prototypes of the game that would lead to its final form. While developing The Making of Karateka, Digital Eclipse were called upon to develop the Atari 50 compilation. As they had been already making an interactive documentary for The Making of Karateka, they applied what they had developed into Atari 50.[18] Stephen Frost, producer of Atari 50, found that as there had been several compilations of Atari games, it was important to expand on the concept in a new release that would give the story of the company and how their hardware influenced both the arcade and video game industries. This led Digital Eclipse to apply the interactive timeline which presents text, images, video footage and playable games to form a narrative.[6][18] The engineers at Digital Eclipse built a system that allowed them to add material in a timeline without extensive programming.[15]
Some games could not be included with the release as Atari no long had the rights to them, such as the arcade games Marble Madness (1984), S.T.U.N. Runner (1989), and San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing (1996), the rights to which belonged to Warner Bros. following the bankruptcy of Midway, which had previously had the rights to Atari Games. Other games that were not included were attached to other licenses, such as the arcade game Star Wars (1983), the Atari Jaguar game Alien vs Predator (1994), and the Atari 2600 game Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982).[4][11] Frost explained that processes were started on getting permission to include certain titles and art assets for other games, which was allowed for games like Yoomp!. Some initial work was made on an emulator for the Atari ST line of computers, but halted when Frost concluded that there were not enough resources to complete the emulator to the quality required.[11]
Programmer Dave Rees said that a few games for the Atari 2600 required unique emulation. These included Secret Quest, which uses the switch to display a code-entry status screen. This game required unique code to get it to toggle with a press of a button.[15] Rich Whitehouse created the Atari Jaguar emulator and found it particularly challenging. Whitehouse stated that there was not a lot of documentation for the system's hardware, and what documentation did exist had inaccuracies or was missing information. Whitehouse stated that getting the system to run smoothly on the Nintendo Switch "ended up being its own challenge."[11]
Digital Eclipse created new games for the compilation based on Atari properties and individual members' interests and expertise.[11] These six new games are under the Atari Reimagined label. These are Haunted Houses, Neo Breakout, Quadratrank, Swordquest: AirWorld, VCTR-SCTR (pronounced "Vector Sector") and Yars' Revenge Reimagined.[8][12]Swordquest: AirWorld was developed by Dave Rees as an attempt to make a final game in the Swordquest series of games. He consulted Tod Frye, who worked on developing the game in the 1980s, on what the new version would be like. Yars' Revenge Reimainged was developed by Mike Mika. The game adds more effects and audio to the original game. VCTR-SCTR is a completely new game, inspired by vector graphics, by Jeremy Williams. Williams wrote his own software renderer that let him model vertices in a 3D space and connect them to form wireframes.[12][19]Haunted Houses was also developed by Rees and featured 3D and voxel-based graphics.[20]Neo-Breakout and Quadratank were developed by Jason Cirillo and Mika respectively.[19]
Digital Eclipse gathered video footage from The Strong, the National Videogame Museum and the Museum of Videogame Art and private collectors to include in the release. Kohler, said that there was no shortage of footage to draw from, but that they had to whittle the content down to what was important for the narrative.[6] All archival footage is captured from original sources. Commercials for Atari were provided by Hans Reutter, including a film scan of an Atari theatrical advertisement.[15]
List of games
There are 115 games available in the collection.[21][22]
Critics complimented the release's timeline structure, with Sammy Barker of Push Square proclaiming the timeline to be introspective and interesting, and that Atari's history was shown as a "warts and all perspective, which is appreciated".[38] Andrew Webster of The Verge echoed this, stating that without the timeline structure he would have played these games "for a few minutes and then moved on; with it, I'm much more invested in understanding what they are and how they fit into gaming history, and I know what to look for when I dive in."[17] Matt Gardner of Forbes discussed the documentary footage in the timeline, stating that the former Atari employees show pride in their past work. He also expressed appreciation of the examinations of the highs and lows of the company, finding that it "knows when to fight its corner–like declaring the Atari Lynx was underappreciated–but the game doesn't pull its punches, whether that's criticizing business decisions, former CEOs, games, advertising campaigns, or minor things like how crap the Atari 400's keyboard was."[13] Samuel Claiborn of IGN desired that more people be involved in the documentaries, such as the prominent women developers, Atari's art and marketing departments as well as decades of journalists, historians and collectors, saying this could have added further context.[4]
Many reviewers commented that many of the games included have not aged well.[4][5][13][38] A reviewer in Edge highlighted the arcade releases as having both quantity and quality, and said the Atari 2600 games have held up less well and that the selection of Lynx and Jaguar games were mostly curiosities.[40] Shaun Musgrave of TouchArcade expanded that "not every game here is good, of course. But there's something interesting about each of them. Even the familiar old arcade and 2600 games that have been endlessly re-released can be appreciated a little more with the extra info attached in this collection."[10] Webster complimented the variations on games, allowing audiences to compare games like Dark Chambers and Scrapyard Dog on different systems.[17]
Claiborn found that some games had better ways to be played due the nature of the original hardware, such as Centipede's trackball, Tempest's spinner controls, and the Atari 7800 and Jaguar controllers, but found that games for the Atari 2600 controlled better due the quality of the original system's control stick.[4]Edge magazine, Barker, Massey and Musgrave lamented some historically important games missing, such as Computer Space (1971), Firefox (1984), one of the first Laserdisc-driven arcade games, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or any games for Atari ST computers.[36][38][10][40][3] Graham Russel of Siliconera commented that the release lacked any discussion of Atari's history or products released between 1998 and 2020, such as the Atari Flashback series.[3]
Both Gardner and Webster declared Atari 50 to be among the best compilation video game titles released.[17][13] Massey compared the compilation to Capcom Arcade Stadium (2021), finding that the title "comes with pretty 3D-rendered gimmickry that resembles an actual arcade, but lacks the internal warmth exuded [on Atari 50]."[36] Jason Fanelli of Game Informer declared it had set a new standard for historical video game compilations.[5]
Legacy
In 2023, Digital Eclipse announced they would adapt the historical timeline format used in Atari 50 into other projects, under the Gold Master Series branding. Kohler stated that the audience immediately picked up the idea of going through a timeline within Atari 50 and following the history, which gave the team at Digital Eclipse the confidence to continue with the format. The first Gold Master Series release was The Making of Karateka (2023), which chronicled the history of Karateka (1984) which was followed by Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story (2024).[41][42][43]
Atari announced on October 31, 2023 that they would acquire Digital Eclipse.[44] Atari closed the deal by November 6, 2023.[45] A free update to the collection on December 5, 2023 added 12 games, including two unreleased prototypes (Aquaventure and Save Mary), two homebrew 2600 games featured in previous compilations[23][46] (Adventure II, Return to Haunted House), and eight official titles (Bowling, Circus Atari, Double Dunk, Maze Craze, Miniature Golf, MotoRodeo, Super Football, and Warbirds).[47][22]
Asteroids is a space-themed multidirectional shooter arcade video game designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a single spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers, while not colliding with either, or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.
The Atari 2600 is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System, it popularized microprocessor-based hardware and games stored on swappable ROM cartridges, a format first used with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976. The VCS was bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a game cartridge—initially Combat and later Pac-Man. Sears sold the system as the Tele-Games Video Arcade. Atari rebranded the VCS as the Atari 2600 in November 1982 alongside the release of the Atari 5200.
Solaris is a space combat video game for the Atari 2600 published in 1986 by Atari. The game involves a player seeking out the planet Solaris via their starship. To accomplish this, the player must navigate the galactic scanner to explore quadrants of a map. Doing so allows them to explore Federation planets to refuel their ship, and engage in combat with hostile aliens known as the Zylons.
Frogger is a 1981 arcade action game developed by Konami and published by Sega. In North America, it was distributed by Sega/Gremlin. The object of the game is to direct five frogs to their homes by dodging traffic on a busy road, then crossing a river by jumping on floating logs and alligators.
Miner 2049er is a platform game developed for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers by Bill Hogue and released by his company, Big Five Software, in 1982. The player controls Bounty Bob through multiple levels of a mine, with the goal of traversing all of the platforms while avoiding or defeating enemy mutants. At a time when "climbing games" such as Donkey Kong had four screens, Miner 2049er had ten.
Dig Dug is a maze arcade video game developed by Namco in 1981 and released in 1982, distributed in North America by Atari, Inc. The player controls Dig Dug to defeat all enemies per stage, by either inflating them to bursting or crushing them underneath rocks.
Tempest is a 1981 arcade game by Atari Inc., designed and programmed by Dave Theurer. It takes place on a three-dimensional surface divided into lanes, sometimes as a closed tube, and viewed from one end. The player controls a claw-shaped "blaster" that sits on the edge of the surface, snapping from segment to segment as a rotary knob is turned.
Crystal Castles is an arcade game released by Atari, Inc. in 1983. The player controls Bentley Bear who has to collect gems located throughout trimetric-projected rendered castles while avoiding enemies, some of whom are after the gems as well.
Combat is a 1977 video game by Atari, Inc. for the Atari Video Computer System. In the game, two players controlling either a tank, a biplane, or a jet fire missiles at each other for two minutes and sixteen seconds. Points are scored by hitting the opponent, and the player with the most points when the time runs out wins. Variations on the gameplay introduce elements such as invisible vehicles, missiles that ricochet off of walls, and different playing fields.
Haunted House is a 1982 adventure video game programmed by James Andreasen for the Atari Video Computer System and published by Atari. The player controls an avatar shaped like a pair of eyes who explores a mansion seeking out parts of an urn to return to the entrance. The game world is populated by roaming enemies including vampire bats, tarantulas, and a ghost. Haunted House was among the first games to use player-controlled scrolling between large portions of the visual space.
Air-Sea Battle is a fixed shooter developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari VCS. Air-Sea Battle is partially based on the 1975 Atari arcade video game Anti-Aircraft where each player uses a ground-based gun to shoot passing aircraft. The cartridge adds other variants, such as planes dropping bombs on ships and a carnival-themed shooting gallery.
Atari: 80 Classic Games in One!, known as Atari Anthology on consoles, is a video game collection developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Atari Interactive. The title is a compilation of 80 video games previously published by Atari, Inc. and Atari Corporation, reproducing Atari's games from its arcade and Atari 2600 game console platforms. Many games permit one to play each title at varying speeds, with time limits, or with a shifting color palette.
Bowling is a sports video game published in 1979 by Atari, Inc. for the Atari VCS. It was programmed by Larry Kaplan who left Atari to co-found Activision the same year. The game is an interpretation of the sport bowling, playable by one or two players.
Karateka is a 1984 martial arts action game for the Apple II by Jordan Mechner. It is his first published game and was created while he was attending Yale University. The game was published in North America by Broderbund and in Europe by Ariolasoft. Along with Karate Champ and Yie-Ar Kung Fu, Karateka is one of the earliest martial arts fighting games. It was inspired by Japanese culture and by early Disney animated films and silent pictures.
Surround is a video game programmed by Alan Miller and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari Video Computer System. The game played similar to the arcade game Blockade (1976) which allowed players to navigate a continuously moving block around an enclosed space as a wall trails behind it. Every time the opposite player had their brick hit a wall, the opposing player would earn a single point with the winner being the first to collect ten points.
Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection is a compilation of fighting games from the Street Fighter series developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Capcom in celebration of the series' 30th anniversary. The collection was released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in May 2018.
Secret Quest is an action-adventure game developed by Axlon for the Atari 2600 and published by Atari Corporation in 1989. The player controls a humanoid character that fights monsters and gathers items on a series of space stations. It was one of the last cartridges released for the console and has a larger ROM capacity than most 2600 games plus a small amount of RAM. The box credits Nolan Bushnell for the game and includes his photo on both the front and back. According to Secret Quest programmer Steve DeFrisco, "Atari thought that his name would entice people to buy some more 2600 titles".
SNK 40th Anniversary Collection is a video game compilation developed by Digital Eclipse consisting of arcade and console games published by SNK between 1979 and 1990. The collection was released for the Nintendo Switch in 2018, and later in 2019 for PlayStation 4 on March 19, Xbox One on May 3, and Steam on July 7.
Outlaw is a 1978 video game developed at Atari by David Crane. The game is a variation of the arcade game Gun Fight (1975). Upon release, it received positive reviews from Creative Computing, The Space Gamer and the Xenia Daily Gazette.
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is an interactive documentary and compilation video game developed by Digital Eclipse. The release chronicles the software of British developer Jeff Minter and over 40 of his programs developed between 1981 and 1994. It is the second release in Digital Eclipse's Gold Master Series that began with The Making of Karateka (2023), which chronicled the history of the game Karateka (1984).
References
↑ Digital Eclipse (November 11, 2022). Atari 50 (Nintendo Switch). Atari. Credits Producers: Drew Scanlon, Bao Calvin Vu
↑ Digital Eclipse (November 11, 2022). Atari 50 (Nintendo Switch). Atari. Credits Audio/Music: Bob Baffy
1 2 Digital Eclipse (November 11, 2022). Atari 50 (Nintendo Switch). Atari. Touch Me: Platform: LED Handheld Game. [...] Atari incorporated [Ralph] Barer's improvements in their own handheld version of Touch me, which has been digitally reproduced here by Digital Eclipse.
1 2 Digital Eclipse (November 11, 2022). Atari 50 (Nintendo Switch). Atari. Credits Reimagined Games: 'Haunted Houses / Swordquest: AirWorld developed by Dave Rees Neo-Breakout / TouchMe Simulation developed by Jason Cirillo Quadratank / Yar's Revenge Enhanced developed by Mike Mika VCTR-SCTR developed by Jeremy Williams.
1 2 Digital Eclipse (December 5, 2023). Atari 50 (Nintendo Switch). Atari. Adventure II: Platform: Atari 2600. Release Year: 2005 [...] This official sequel to the Atari 2600 classic was created by Curt Vendel in 2005 for the Atari Flashback 2 plug-and-play gaming console, incorporating elements from the Atari 5200 homebrew game by Ron Lloyd.
↑ Digital Eclipse (December 5, 2023). Atari 50 (Nintendo Switch). Atari. Return to Haunted House: Platform: Atari 2600. Release Year: 2005 [...] Homebrew programmer Anthony Wong created this game in 2005 to continue the legacy of the original Haunted House.
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