Very few things are as much my jam as Atari 50. I love old game compilations and I love weird multimedia archaeology where there's just tons of little bits and pieces to sift through, and this is just those two things together, plus a few weird little games made for the collection attempting to draw a line between these old games and the current day. Like, Haunted Houses is in many ways just really honing in on the point that the original Haunted House is the prototype of every single Slenderman game.
On one hand, it's not quite the same as an actual documentary. There's not so much of an overarching narrative here. On the other, the fact that you actually get to play the games for yourself is a huge advantage over what a traditional documentary could offer. It's not really the "story" of Atari but, as the title suggests, a celebration of all this stuff. All the games and the people they could pull in to interview about the drugs they did in the 70s. It put me in the right mindset to appreciate the fact that Missile Command is a bleak political statement on top of being an arcade quarter-muncher. That Yars Revenge is a pile of very strange, oblique mechanics justified by a super cool comic in the manual. That current box art sucks in comparison to the shit they were commissioning back then because the only real way to build a context for the gameplay was to put a picture of a space ship on the box.
Naturally, you can never really recreate the context. My home is not an arcade and my controller is not a track ball. Oh my god the track ball games are basically unplayable in any other form. Those aren't really problems anybody could fix though.
The "reimagined" series is interesting to me because each one is coming at the task from a very different angle. You've got a version of Haunted House that turns it into a very modern indie game type of thing. You've got a version of Yars Revenge that just puts a fancier coat of paint. You've got a hypothetical fourth Sword Quest game made to the specs it would have originally had to follow. The Vector Games combo was probably the most interesting to me, even if it's mostly spectacle. It was a nice spectacle!
I want to rate the collection as a whole and maybe drill into some of these games in the future because the collection is sort of separate from the individual games and rating it on the fact that I find most of them to be uncompelling would be missing the point. But I do want to dig more into some of these games. I've been rotating them in my mind since I passed by them in the collection. Missile Command, Sword Quest, Star Raiders... honestly, I've seen all of these games before and not left with that impulse until Atari 50. I don't think I could possibly come up with higher praise than that.
On one hand, it's not quite the same as an actual documentary. There's not so much of an overarching narrative here. On the other, the fact that you actually get to play the games for yourself is a huge advantage over what a traditional documentary could offer. It's not really the "story" of Atari but, as the title suggests, a celebration of all this stuff. All the games and the people they could pull in to interview about the drugs they did in the 70s. It put me in the right mindset to appreciate the fact that Missile Command is a bleak political statement on top of being an arcade quarter-muncher. That Yars Revenge is a pile of very strange, oblique mechanics justified by a super cool comic in the manual. That current box art sucks in comparison to the shit they were commissioning back then because the only real way to build a context for the gameplay was to put a picture of a space ship on the box.
Naturally, you can never really recreate the context. My home is not an arcade and my controller is not a track ball. Oh my god the track ball games are basically unplayable in any other form. Those aren't really problems anybody could fix though.
The "reimagined" series is interesting to me because each one is coming at the task from a very different angle. You've got a version of Haunted House that turns it into a very modern indie game type of thing. You've got a version of Yars Revenge that just puts a fancier coat of paint. You've got a hypothetical fourth Sword Quest game made to the specs it would have originally had to follow. The Vector Games combo was probably the most interesting to me, even if it's mostly spectacle. It was a nice spectacle!
I want to rate the collection as a whole and maybe drill into some of these games in the future because the collection is sort of separate from the individual games and rating it on the fact that I find most of them to be uncompelling would be missing the point. But I do want to dig more into some of these games. I've been rotating them in my mind since I passed by them in the collection. Missile Command, Sword Quest, Star Raiders... honestly, I've seen all of these games before and not left with that impulse until Atari 50. I don't think I could possibly come up with higher praise than that.