Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
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Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Media
Critic Reviews for Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration offers a completely new, very fun way to explore several decades of Atari arcade machines, consoles, handhelds, and PCs.
With Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, Digital Eclipse has set a new bar for future historical compilations in video games. It's a digital traveling museum exhibit, as the game bursts at the seams with nostalgia thanks to more than 100 playable games and hundreds of relics from the developer's vault. While a good amount of the games offered will pass by quickly, those brief life spans cannot weigh down the amazing historical value of Atari 50, and I hope Digital Eclipse has more wings of its digital history tour opening in the coming years.
That it's called 'The Anniversary Celebration' rather than 'collection' is a substitution of phrases that couldn't be more apt. With its smooth, fast, and perfectly-pitched interface, and rich, thoughtfully created content, Atari 50 really is an honouring of the company that founded the industry. It's true that its content is going to have a greater appeal to an older generation of gamers, to today's parents (and grandparents) who grew up in the whirlwind of the '70s and '80s arcade scene. For them, reliving moments and experiences that used to cost a pocketful of coins will be joyful. For others, understanding the appeal of a lot of these games will take work, and few of the titles outside of the Lynx and Jaguar catalogues are easy to pick up and play for the uninitiated. At the same time, Atari 50 is so thorough and engrossing a retro gaming tunnel, akin to exploring a virtual museum, that it transcends its target audience somewhat. For those interested in video gaming's history, the unearthing of the past, and for gamers not afraid of what today is considered rudimentary, there's a great deal of enjoyment to be had in this trip down memory lane.
Several of the 19 new games — specifically those not found on the 2600 — are sadly not included in the new timeline and will need to be located within Atari 50’s game library. It’s no dealbreaker, but it would’ve been nice to get a bit of background information on their creation. We also feel like the exclusion of the original games created for the Intellivison to be a bit of a missed opportunity, but understandable given that this is Atari 50, not Intellivision 50. Fingers crossed Digital Eclipse will create something specific to that console's history now that the brand and associated IP are in Atari's hands.
Fifty years is a long old time to remain even slightly relevant in the games industry, and whilst this package probably wont win too many new fans, it gives retro fans a great walk down memory lane.
A wonderful way to celebrate Atari's history, with plenty of information and lots of games to play and re-discover.
Review in Italian | Read full review
More than just a retro compilation, this is a fascinating attempt to create an interactive history of Atari, that goes above and beyond in terms of trawling the archives and creating new remakes.
Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is an absolute masterclass in how to fashion a retro compilation, all the while providing both contemporary and older gamers with an immediately accessible and immaculately produced window into the halcyon days of one of the video game industry's most prolific pioneers. This is the preservation of video game history done right and Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is the best retro compilation ever made, bar none.
