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 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.
3 Comments
Yeah, there's definitely plenty of room for improvement, but from what I've seen it's still miles ahead of most other old game collections sadly. Really hoping it paves the way for other companies to do stuff like this though, the interviews are some of the best parts and it's extremely smart to put them into a game collection like this, but they really stop showing up a ton once you get to the computers and almost entirely once you hit the Lynx and Jaguar
I agree! It's a good start for video game history collections. I'm excited to try that new game, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. It's made by the same company. Minter's work is insane. Played the vr game Polybius from him that I swear is the closest you can get to taking psychedelics without actually taking any haha. I highly recommend.
AlasEarwax
26 days ago