Atari 50 is a fantastic compilation of Atari games throughout the years, from the arcade, to the 2600, to the Jaguar, and everything inbetween. As you go through the timelines you get to try out tons of classic games, sprinkled with high-resolution scans of manuals, print ads, and interviews from key Atari and other game industry personnel.

As far as game compilations go this is certainly one of the best ones out there, even if quite a lot of the games don't hold up well (if they ever were in the first place). It would have been nice to have some more famous titles as particularly licensed ones (such as E.T.) are absent, but with the quantity and even new creations it's hard to really complain. Especially when none of the games in the collection are half as bad as the penultimate interview, being several minutes with the creator of Ready Player One.

A virtual museum into the genesis of video games

I'd like to preface this review by apologizing for the recent review spam as I go through most of the games in the collection.

I can safely say I was never into video games of a pure retro nature mostly. I lacked the patience and my brain has rotted to the point that I found it hard to really go back sometimes. I knew about Pong and Asteroids and my only real experience with Atari's legacy was a parody of it via watching Code Monkeys as a kid and just know seeing how much it really influenced that show. Most of my arcade experiences themselves derived from Namco mostly due to the fact that The PlayStation 1 titles worked as virtual museums as well as its own space which I also recommend you check out if you enjoy this type of collection. That said, this is a pretty great collection that goes in depth of what exactly Atari did for the video game space and as a company itself.

I really don't want to delve too much into the story of Atari due to the fact that the collection does a better job of it than I ever will but I will say that it manages to go into depth a bit with the people that were actually there at the time. Video interviews, statements, reading the flyers from then and even secret memos and corporate documents from then really give you the context of what went into making the games. Going into Adventure's influence, explaining how hard it was to make games for the 2600 due to the fact that they had to constrict themselves to a specific limit compared to creating arcade titles and even crazy stories like how much weed the developers smoked. There's a lot more here to unpack but I really do believe the collection does it justice better than a few sentences I could muster really do.

The games themselves are cool as every library is covered barring a few important ones sadly. The Jaguar collection itself seems to be lacking as well (for better or worse) but I feel like you got a lot of the important classics for the most part. Tempest ended up being a personal favorite of mine for the visual style and fast paced gameplay and this also its Jaguar counterpart, Tempest 2000. Classics like Pong, Asteroids, Star Raiders and Adventure are here with some wacky concept games like Ninja Golf really surprising me. Also a cool addition is that each game comes with its manual and appropriate media to get the most out of the games too making this much more than just a regular collection of emulated games.

Digital Eclipse did a great job with this collection. Being given a bit more insight into the inner workings of how the concept of household video games as a whole is something I didn't expect to come out of knowing. Really wish a lot of arcade or early game collections were like this where you have first hand accounts and documents explaining the intricacies of making a specific game or how something specific came to be. If you have a huge appreciation for the medium, this is definitely worth taking a look at and only hoping more things like these comes around.

context is why this collection thrives

whether you grew up with atari games, you find their primitive nature to be charming, or you kinda fucking hate them and claim they're boring as sin - atari 50 has something for you

this isn't a hollow game collection - it's an interactive museum. many of the titles on here are backed by interesting concept art, corporate documents, and even developer interviews. it's so fascinating to see the rise and fall of atari chronicled so honestly from the people that saw it eat shit firsthand. the whole presentation really enriches a lot of the games on here. arcade inlays and side panels are replicated, shitass controls are optimized for controllers, and some classics are even remade faithfully from the ground up

my only gripe is that this strain on the historical angle means some more fun and exciting picks were left out. this especially is noticeable on the jaguar selection. there's not a single cd-based pick on here, and a lot of more interesting titles (attack of the mutant penguins for instance) are omitted in favor of absolute fucking trash like atari karts and club drive. not the end of the world since emulators exist, but an oversight nonetheless

This has to be the best retro compilation I've ever played. I thought I knew most of what there was to know about Atari, but this game proved me wrong. I couldn't have been more happy either. Digital Eclipse managed to dip up some truly fascinating tidbits of Atari history. 30 (!) pages of design documents for major havoc? Sign me up!

Rarely do we see compilations made with this much passion and true care. Most of them we get nowadays are nothing more than rom collections with basic menus and paltry options.

The games themselves in this collection range from masterworks to fascinating artifacts of a bygone era. Most of them (I would say the majority at least) are still incredibly fun to play. Sure I may not play cybermorph or Sprint 8 as much as I will say Tempest 2000, but having the chance to finally play those games for myself was still a treat. In fact this is the first time any Atari Jaguar games have been rereleased officially.

The presentation is damn near flawless. The arcade games are probably the standout in this regard. Presented in their original ratios with the cabinets faithfully reproduced. The same goes for the console games, only here the borders are television sets, computer monitors and more. You can also pause the game at any time to read the manual or arcade flyer (depending on the game of course).

Overall, Digital Eclipse has somehow outdone themselves yet again. All I can hope for now is for more game companies to give these talented folks free reign over their back catalogs.

Not really a "game" or even really a "game compilation". To my knowledge, this is probably the first true multimedia gaming museum product.

The history of Atari is presented in 5 separate timelines separated into things like arcade, pc, early console.

The artifacts presented here are head and shoulders above any gaming collection I've ever played. Every game has high-res box art and a scan of the original manual.

Newly produced videos with the original designers of the games are presented as necessary context to help enjoy your minutes (that's as long as I spent with any of the games) in game.

Digital Eclipse has even created "re-imaginings of some of the classic games. VCTR SCTR is a genuinely awesome mix of several old Atari shooting games. Haunted Houses is real bad... a fitting tribute to the original.

The collection contains relics of the time such as TV and magazine advertisements, design documentations, and stock footage.

I'm only marginally interested in Atari but the respect given here to game history and honestly to the audience who would consume this product is amazing. I can only hope that this is successful enough to generate more similarly curated museum products, as I would snap buy a curation like this for nearly any company/genre.

In recent years, I've become a big fan of videogame documentaries and books. Not the making-of things that publishers have created to promote a new release, and paint everything in a glowing light, but the retrospective deep dives that give us a better understanding of how and why games turned out the way they are. My top recommendations would be Darren Wall's Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, From Bedrooms to Billions: The PlayStation Revolution, Playing with Power: The Nintendo Story and Power On: The Story of Xbox. They all have flaws, and none of them are definitive, but they all do a great job of shining light on the creative decisions and constraints that lead to the consoles that shaped the industry. One of the biggest outliers in this has been Atari, who were the company that turned some exciting computer experiments into a business. Instead of a book, film or TV series, they've opted to do what's in their nature and sell us a videogame.

There are aspects of Atari 50 that are really terrific. The menus take you through a linear history of Atari, chronicling releases and events through archival footage, newly recorded interviews, scanned documents, incredible artwork - and importantly - playable games. The start of this timeline gives a really strong impression, with 1973 footage of Nolan Bushnell walking through a warehouse of newly-produced Pong cabinets, and insight into just what these people were working with as they introduced the general public to videogames. Each game is framed with archival material, developer interviews and advertisements that give us a far better impression of their intentions and how they were met than just giving us a ROM and leaving a 2022 audience to make their own impressions, ignorant of what each game really is.

This naturally becomes less of a factor as the seventies shift to the eighties, when licensed titles that Atari don't have the rights to rerelease, and third-parties become more important to the Atari 2600's history than the first party line-up. I'm no Atari enthusiast, but I could see the massive gaps in the story. E.T. and Pac-Man coverage essentially amounts to a photo of the landfill, and Activision appear to have no interest in having anything to do with this release. Regardless, it's still a great place to learn about the console. I've gained new respect for what developers were able to produce on a system where programmers had to write code around where the CRT gun was drawing as it produced each new frame, sixty times a second. People weren't making Secret Quest because they were too stupid to make Grand Theft Auto V. It took incredible skill, patience and imagination to produce this stuff.

This declining insight carries us through the rest of the eighties, and into the nineties, and the Jaguar titles seem like a novelty for PR rather than something that was considered part of the remit. We're rarely given any insight into how these titles were made, what they were intended to accomplish, or the competition they were up against. There's no Atari ST games here, which from a European perspective, seems like a massive oversight. This is mainly an American product for nostalgic boomers, and serves limited purpose for videogame fans interested in the industry's history.

Then there's how it fares as a compilation. The framing device really works well to give players appreciation for the games on offer. Atari aren't a Nintendo or a Namco or a Sega, though. They aren't sitting on a treasure trove of undeniable all-time classics. They're an important part of videogame history, and it's great to get to play a lot of these games, but there's not many that you're likely to come back to afterwards. What's most disappointing is how they've opted to emulate paddle controls. Much of Atari's earliest games relied on an analogue dial to control paddles, and I insist that if you give players an appropriate alternative, Pong, Breakout and Warlords can still be a great time for modern audiences. That's not really the case with how Atari 50 presents them, with jumpy, unreliable control. Analogue controllers do a far better job of emulating trackballs, though, and I've come away from Atari 50 as a new Missile Command fan. The blunt brutality of its subject and presentation still connects, and the increasing desperation from players as they attempt to hang onto their remaining missiles and silos, pre-empting how the strikes will land, is really great. It's a political Space Invaders, and far better for it.

Irrespective of how little the documentary side of the package seems to care about them, the later games are still interesting. I now feel like I've got a personal connection to how shite the Jaguar truly was. How completely out of their depth Atari were in launching Club Drive and Fight for Life against Ridge Racer and Virtua Fighter 2. Tempest 2000 is still pretty cool, but it's a shame they didn't go a little further in working with Jeff Minter and include 3000 or TxK. I know there were better Jaguar games, but you're not going to find Aliens vs Predator or Cannon Fodder in a 2022 Atari release.

Then there's the "Reimagined" tribute titles that have been included. They're very curious, sitting on the timeline alongside their primary inspirations. They feel like those out-of-touch arcade revivals we got in the 90s and 2000s, like the PS2 Defender or PS1 Centipede, and they're likely the result of commercially unviable projects for that new VCS that you already forgot was a thing. I know Atari love Haunted House, and see it as a direct progenitor of Resident Evil, but I fucking don't. A newly-produced release of the final SwordQuest game, "Airworld" is here, but I'm unconvinced that if it had come out in 1984, it would have included a Flappy Bird minigame. "VCTR-SCTR" is a kind-of-cool tribute to Vector-based arcade games, shifting between homages to Asteroids, Lunar Lander and Tempest, almost WarioWare style, but it feels out of place alongside a visually enhanced version of Yar's Revenge that boasts it's still built on 2600 code. In fact, why are these here at all, and not Atari's cloying post-Jaguar attempts? These count as historical, but PS1 Pong and 2008 Alone in the Dark don't?

So, it's a mixed bag. Maybe this team could have put out a really great series of videos covering Atari's history, but licencing issues become a bigger problem when releasing it as a game. I don't think it sells itself to new players on the strength of its library, though those who grew up playing Atari games in the 70s and 80s might be pleased with what's on offer. I think its strongest parts are solid enough to pave over its shortcomings and missed potential though. As I said in the opening paragraph, none of these releases are definitive or without flaws, and if you can find a reasonable price on Atari 50, it can stand as one of the more interesting entries in that line-up.

This is the kind of game that brings me to tears. Not because I have nostalgia for the Atari days of video games, but because yet again Digital Eclipse has packaged such a beautifully designed museum of documentaries, memorabilia and documents along with a shit ton of games across multiple systems that while I wasn't that child in those days, I can feel their passion and love for the system and brand thru this. Digital Eclipse in the last few years has carved out a bright future of preserving video game history and practically becoming this mediums Criterion Collection. Their SNK Collection made me a massive SNK fan to this day, by demonstration why they mattered and what their legacy did for the industry. All of that artistry is here with "Atari 50th" and if you pine for those days, then don't walk but run to play this, right this second. I've spend the whole weekend diving deep into these games and all the educational material of that era of games and this won't subside for quite a while. While I haven't quite become a rabid fanatic of the brand like the SNK Collection made me, I still highly respect and admire all Atari did for video games and will return to this time and time again to feel that history throughout and to see the roots of the Arcade era of gaming. An era that I wish so deeply I could have lived thru.

This is honestly one of the greatest game compilations I've ever seen. Where other publishers lazily throw a handful of roms in an emulator package then call it a day this one acts more as an interactive museum about Atari and gaming as a whole during the 70s and early to mid 80s onwards. It is filled to the brim with fascinating historical documents, interviews, and overall insight into an era of gaming most people ignore in favor of the NES onward. Even if you're not into this period of video games I highly recommend picking this up for this historical context it provides.
Also it's got Tempest 2000.