In many ways I think this is a golden standard on what a game collection should be. Instead of just throwing a pile of emulated games at you and calling it a day, this game is more akin to a pop culture museum where you can walk though the eras of the company and experience the growth in gaming culture. The always present elephant in the room is yeah, almost all of these games either suck or age so poorly it's really not worth playing them for more then maybe 10 minutes, so if you purely just want to play some games there are countless better game collections out there. That being said, this game really is wonderful. I loved seeing the history of Atari and how they began the gaming industry only to struggle due to being the first to the point they fell out of any good graces. The only real complaint I have is at times I wish it went more in detail, I know there is just only so much it could do but like I wish there were more old ads, and talked more about the issues working for Atari behind the scenes of the games. I am glad it at least showed some of the drama and Atari mishandling their talent. Overall I definitely recommend this to anyone who wants a gaming history lesson.

An incredible collection of mostly terrible video games.

Atari 50 works because it understands so deeply why anyone would ever want to play 40 year old Atari games: historical context. Between the games you're offered a large helping of video interviews from Atari programmers, high quality scans of magazine advertisements and design documents, and it's all organized within a few different timelines, generally separated by console and/or era. You get to see and then play the fall-off from arcade games to home console games, from home console games to handhelds, you really get to internalize what the appeal of 2600 games was and why that formula ended up killing Atari in the 90s as they struggled to keep up with the changing industry, among many, many other historical subthreads.

I'm not going to mince words about the quality of the games themselves--most of them are bad, even in the context of their own releases, with most of the home console games just being shittier versions of decent-at-best arcade games, and it might be a bit overkill to try and write something about all of them like I did (I certainly got burnt out in the Jaguar/Lynx era where almost everything is dogshit). Plenty of these games are good, you get to play classics like Missile Command and Warlords, but you also get to play quite a bit of trash, including all four SwordQuest games, Canyon Bomber, and fucking Scrapyard Dog for the Atari Lynx.

But you knew this walking in! You're playing an Atari collection, not a Nintendo collection--you know this is a story about a fall, not a success. Atari 50 thankfully holds shockingly few bars in terms of its honesty, throughout the interview clips you'll hear half a dozen programmers saying that coding for the 2600 sucked ass and no one wanted to do it, that nobody had a concept of console generations and Atari got stuck in a loop out of incompetence, and once Nintendo showed up to the party the story was as good as done. Unfortunately as the game goes on the presence of the interviews especially get lighter and lighter, but there's always plenty of scans of related media from the time, recordings of old commercials, the whole deal.

You play Atari 50 because you want this context in a way deeper felt than just factoids. It's easy to know the surface story of Atari, but actually playing it alongside all of the secondary context-setting material makes this by far one of the best history lessons you can get about video games as a medium, especially considering the very beginning and with the arcade era.

Atari 50 is advertised as a retro game collection, but I think it's best described as an interactive documentary about Atari's game history. The collection contains 100+ games. While that sounds like a bonanza the truth is that most of these games have not aged well, although I'll list my favorites at the end of this log. But each one is accompanied by an encyclopedic blurb describing every game's history, development, game manual, box art etc. There are also video interviews with past Atari developers and from recognizable names in the gaming industry. While there is fun to be had here, Atari 50 is really about telling the story of Atari's early years (which by extension were also the first years of gaming) and the environment they were created in.

I think the thing that impresses me the most about Atari 50 is that it doesn't try to mask itself in nostalgia. It's here to educate you on gaming history, and that involves telling some harsh truths. The blurbs and interviews are very frank and honest about how many Atari games were rushed and not always great products. This contributed to the video game crash in the 80s that almost destroyed the industry. To see a brand reflect on both the good and bad parts of its history is increasingly rare and Atari 50 is all the better for it. I really recommend Atari 50, as unusual as it is. I can't remember the last time a game collection was packaged with such polish and TLC. I'd love to see this format done with other long running gaming publishers/developers like Namco or Konami or even Nintendo. Although that last one is probably a pipe dream (Get it?).

Games worth seeking out in Atari 50:
Black Widow, Centipede, Millipede, Food Fight and Quantum for arcades
RealSports Boxing and Aquaventure for the Atari 2600
Millipede for the Atari 5200
Dark Chambers and Ninja Golf for the Atari 7800
Ruiner Pinball for the Atari Jaguar
Neo Breakout, a new take on Breakout developed for Atari 50 by Digital Eclipse

Played all the way through the documentary / history mode. Such a great idea. I’ve been wanting to buy an Atari collection for a while to play through a few games like Adventure, but I was always hesitant because the vast majority of Atari games are not really worth playing beyond like 5 mins. Presenting them in a format like this is such a smart idea though, it gives context and history to what your actually experiencing. Being able to look through high quality box art scans, manuals and even design documents in some cases is such an amazing value. I think the star of the package has to be the documentary bits though. They feel like small rewards as you continue through the timeline of Atari games every time you hit one. I plan on using this game as a means to play some of the games included more in depth at a later time, but as a historical package, I feel like I’ve already gotten my money’s worth. I hope to see other franchises / companys do stuff like this in the future, its like a living coffee book.