Friday, November 11th 2022
Atari, Celebrates 50 Years of History with the Release of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
Atari—one of the world's most iconic consumer brands and interactive entertainment producers—today launches its new title, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, commemorating 50 years of success, growth, and progress in the video game industry. Available now on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Series X|S, PlayStation 4|5, and Windows PC, Atari 50 functions as an interactive trek through Atari's historic past, featuring a selection of the publisher's most iconic games, and brands, as well as showcasing the creative individuals who launched the video game industry.
A mix of video game collection-meets-anthology, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration showcases the history of Atari through a combination of retro and modern playable games, short videos, never-before-seen interviews, early development diaries, and more. Emulating seven separate console platforms, and containing titles spanning five decades, the library-styled interface presents over 100 video games sorted by era in an intuitive linear timeline. Other files and materials are also part of the package, including early development sketches, hardware schematics, internal memos, pictures, films, and other "artifacts," the majority of which have never been made public.
A digital romp through Atari's enduring past and a peek into the creative minds that created the publisher's legacy, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration invites players to explore the golden age of video games through a new lens. Watch Atari grow from a small Silicon Valley startup to the iconic brand it quickly grew to become, explore early game concepts, and enjoy a handful of reimagined fan-favorites lovingly created by developer Digital Eclipse.
Additional Key Features:
Source:
Atari
A mix of video game collection-meets-anthology, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration showcases the history of Atari through a combination of retro and modern playable games, short videos, never-before-seen interviews, early development diaries, and more. Emulating seven separate console platforms, and containing titles spanning five decades, the library-styled interface presents over 100 video games sorted by era in an intuitive linear timeline. Other files and materials are also part of the package, including early development sketches, hardware schematics, internal memos, pictures, films, and other "artifacts," the majority of which have never been made public.
Additional Key Features:
- Expert Insight Through Storytelling: The collection is outfitted with a handful of various never-before-seen interviews with past-and-present Atari leadership as well as other prolific names in the games industry; complemented, of course, by the video game developers who helped raise Atari to become an industry icon.
- Playable History: The massive selection of over 100 games spans seven different platforms: Arcade, 2600, 5200, 7800, Atari 8-bit computers, and, for the first time ever on modern consoles, Atari Lynx and Jaguar! Play the classics like Tempest 2000, Asteroids, and Yars' Revenge, or dive into some deeper cuts.
- Reimagined and Revisited: The team at Digital Eclipse created six new games for the collection that reimagines some of the most beloved Atari classics or put a twist on classic game themes, including Haunted House, Neo Breakout, Yars' Revenge, Vctr Sctr, and the infamously never-finished Airworld.
49 Comments on Atari, Celebrates 50 Years of History with the Release of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
The games are great and it's cool to have access on modern platforms without having to use workarounds, but they are taking their sweet margins on ancient games that either are or should be public domain already.
GOG dot com. Get on it please. We DRM-Free activists will thank you.
EDIT:
Nevermind! As stated below, found it on GOG. Thank You!That's a very cool thing too!And there's something wrong with that, why?
40.us and no blood soaked violence :/
This is to new to me :fear:
We played it a few times but since the number of games on it is limited, didn't take long to get bored with it so we boxed and stored it.
May or may not hook it up again one of these days - We'll see.
Atari published PC games? Did they own Activision?
I believe soit seems no, they never owned Activision, just a very close partnership.Just logged into GOG to check something and was greeted with the following:www.gog.com/en/game/atari_50_the_anniversary_celebration
Someone let @TheLostSwede know with a suggestion to update the article!
I don't think there are any games like Missile Command or Tempest (not sure if that was an Atari arcade game or not) now.
I remember another bizarre Atari 2600 game that simulated a nuclear reactor and you had to bounce the particles into a holding chamber (by colliding with them) in order to win.
Atari invented pong I believe. I remember once seeing an arcade version of pong that was built into barroom tables (and by then no one wanted to play pong anymore).
For me personally a lot prior to the NES area isn't attracting anymore. Lacks too much mechanical & visual depths. :oops: Remastered with new visuals & 60+FPS however, which ... drumroll, Activision already did, that's more my cup of tea. They have already released 7 games under the ATARI Recharged program, bet there are more to come.Activision released some pretty banger games back in the days. Still remember the Activision logo, always connected with some darker games.
Esp. Altered Beast I can't get of my head. It's now on Steam for 0,99€, so I'll give it a go in a sale & see if it still holds up, lol. Also a prehistoric arena game where the player has a physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger & you can chop of heads in a finishing move. And a game where you have to fight against skeletons. Can't remember their names, and I have to say it's pretty hard to find some info nowadays, lol.
Another one I couldn't get out of my head is Blackthorne. Luckily Blizzard included it in their Blizzard® Arcade Collection. Launched almost 2 years ago, it's still only 3 games. Guess they gave up on it. :(
There were knockoffs of course - I don't recall seeing alot of Activision made versions, mostly Coleco's for these handheld games. There was also baseball, basketball and a few other variants with these red dots.
I'm too young to have experienced the golden age of video games, but I can vaguely remember some of them from my very early childhood. The people behind these classics deserve nothing but praise, given the limited capabilities of the contemporary hardware. If it hadn't been for those pioneers, video gaming might not have developed into the great industry it is today. And we may not have experienced later games that drew inspiration from those early developments.
8-bit games were a new paradigm. A new mode of fun and entertainment. A new culture. A new industry.
16-bit games added size, complexity, more graphics and more sound and an opportunity for companies to increase prices and profit margins. But I'd argue it was all quantity, volumes and prices and not quality. 99.9% of 16-bit games can be gladly archived in the wastebin of history. They might have been an exciting development in the concept of LONG game, an ADVENTURE game, rather than the 3 minutes game wonders like the 8 bit classics. But I can't think of one 16bit game that I would touch today. 16 bit was only a stepping stone on the road to 32-bit gaming.
Long live 8-bit!
Oh and we were already being programmed with advertising -
So the boy has a pink mirror and a flower in his hair, old man is hiding in the bushes staring at the juniors and loads of little blue things living in 'magic mushroom' houses. Not to mention that the signing of the picture at the bottom could easily be read as 'Penis' with an extravagant N.
Yeh, loved the smurfs, the Atari and the early 80's lol
But even Ralph Baer, the principal engineer behind the Odyssey, had most likely heard of Tennis for Two (aka Computer Tennis). This was the first video game created solely for entertainment purposes, and the first game where two players competed in real time. It was showcased at a public exhibition in 1958 and again in 1959.The first one sounds like Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior, and the second could be Golden Axe?
Looking back the where some really great games from the 16-bit area. Esp. on the Super NES:
The 16-bit area and the 32-bit area is where they collected the experience. But the 128-bit area is where it really took of & got super mainstream. To this day the Playstation 2 is still the most sold gaming console (155 million units), and with the most games released (4.379 games). Really impressive, it was really the golden age of console gaming. Has also some of the best games ever created. If you're into retro gaming, the PS2 Slim is where it's at. :cool: Can't get more out of it.
Man, Wikipedia's History of Video Games page is just pure gold. :eek: Info overload, lol.
But who knows, our memories getting pretty foggy after such a long time, lol.
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