Atari, Celebrates 50 Years of History with the Release of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration

[lexluthermiester]

Activision was founded by programmers who had left Atari. Atari refused to allow them to put their name on their games, or take any credit for the work they had done; so they left and became Atari's first third-party developer.

That does not mean that they are not closely partnered. However, looking it up it seems Atari never owned Activision before the Blizzard deal.

 

[mechtech]

I remember playing smurfs on Atari 2600. It was the "Elden Ring' of its time.

Oh and we were already being programmed with advertising -

View attachment 269659

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

lol I remember that

Glad I'm not the only old one around here :|

 

[Bomby569]

As a European gamer Atari doesn't say much to me if anything at all. Was occupied with Spectrum and Amiga.

 

[QuietBob]

I remember playing smurfs on Atari 2600. It was the "Elden Ring' of its time.
Oh and we were already being programmed with advertising -

This may have been the first video game based on a comic, and is one of the first officially licensed games in general. "Bootleg" games based on popular franchises date back to 1971's Star Trek on the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe, but these were hobbyist projects distributed for free.

AFAIK the first officially licensed video game was Star Trek: Phaser Strike for the Microvision, released in 1979.

 

[lemonadesoda]

In case people don't know about this, LEGO is also celebrating ATARI's 50th anniversary with a set similar to the previous NES:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/atari-2600-10306

They've gone to a HUGE effort designing that, and all the licensing for using the imagery. I just downloaded the build instructions. Looks fabulous. BUT WHAT A MISSED OPPORTUNITY. Why on earth did they not go one step further and put a real emulator in there? I won't pay $250 for a lego set, or buy one for the kids at that price. But YES I would consider a set at $300 with a build-and-make-an-emulator and then play with the kids of Xmas. Maybe even $350 with a few working games in cartridges.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

The biggest maker of those back in the day I'm aware of was Coleco.
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.

Yep, I was wrong and I mixed them up, but I got the red dots right!

 

[TheDeeGee]

Atari died like 10-15 years ago, so how did they get to 50?

 

[80251]

Atari died like 10-15 years ago, so how did they get to 50?

Exactly, Atari is just a brand now, not a company that does anything significant.

 

[sepheronx]

Damn, and we have members here who are still much older than Atari.

With that said, I miss my old Atari 5200.

 

[64K]

Happy 50th Atari. My first gaming machine was an Atari 2600 which I bought in 1980. It had 100 bytes of RAM and used 4KB cartridges to hold the games. We've come a heck of long way from that. Notice the joystick with only 1 button.

 

[Mac the Geek]

This may have been the first video game based on a comic, and is one of the first officially licensed games in general. "Bootleg" games based on popular franchises date back to 1971's Star Trek on the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe, but these were hobbyist projects distributed for free.

AFAIK the first officially licensed video game was Star Trek: Phaser Strike for the Microvision, released in 1979.

The Atari 2600 had a cartridge based on that 1971 Star Trek concept. Atari's version was called Stellar Track.

 

[64K]

The Atari 2600 had a cartridge based on that 1971 Star Trek concept. Atari's version was called Stellar Track.

Never played that one. Mostly I played Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pole Position and Centipede.

 

[80251]

What does the "game select" button do on the Atari 2600?

Were the music and sound effects on the Atari 2600 monophonic?

 

[lexluthermiester]

What does the "game select" button do on the Atari 2600?

It was generally used to select difficulty, but was also used to select between different game modes. It depended on the game and the dev.

 

[64K]

Were the music and sound effects on the Atari 2600 monophonic?

Yes the games were monophonic. TVs back then didn't offer stereo iirc.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Yes the games were monophonic. TVs back then didn't offer stereo iirc.

Correct.

 

[defaultluser]

What does the "game select" button do on the Atari 2600?

Were the music and sound effects on the Atari 2600 monophonic?

when you already have the main game lop programmed, you could swap out various different combos, or maybe different sprite sets

it supports up to 99 modees

 

[ratirt]

I loved the Atari 8-bit games. First computer an Atari 65XE
I still play those from time to time with a tear in my eye

 

[MarsM4N]

Wondering if the collection also includes "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial". Apparantly the game was so bad, regarded as "the worst game of all time", they dumped the unsold copies in a landfill (aka. ATARI video game burial). There is even a documentary out there, called "ATARI: Game Over". A must watch for every gamer. Gives also a pretty good insight into the working conditions in ATARI. Not even 15min. in and it already sounds like it was like Woodstock 2.0, lol. Must have been pretty awesome working there. Everything was just more relaxed & fun back in the 70's.

The main protagonist, Howard Scott Warshaw, made also a documentary in 2003 with the former employees of ATARI, called "Once Upon ATARI" (Story of Atari after its fall from the mouths of the people who created and escalate Atari to the top of the computer world, the video game designer and programmers.), which will give even deeper insights. You can get it on GoG, or just search on Youtube. Someone uploaded the whole thing there recently, so be quick before it's gone.

 

[kapone32]

Wondering if the collection also includes "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial". Apparantly the game was so bad, regarded as "the worst game of all time", they dumped the unsold copies in a landfill (aka. ATARI video game burial). There is even a documentary out there, called "ATARI: Game Over". A must watch for every gamer. Gives also a pretty good insight into the working conditions in ATARI. Not even 15min. in and it already sounds like it was like Woodstock 2.0, lol. Must have been pretty awesome working there. Everything was just more relaxed & fun back in the 70's.

The main protagonist, Howard Scott Warshaw, made also a documentary in 2003 with the former employees of ATARI, called "Once Upon ATARI" (Story of Atari after its fall from the mouths of the people who created and escalate Atari to the top of the computer world, the video game designer and programmers.), which will give even deeper insights. You can get it on GoG, or just search on Youtube. Someone uploaded the whole thing there recently, so be quick before it's gone.

Atari was around when friends would only play Video Games inside (Arcades don't count) we would gather at a Friend's house. I can't remember which of my Friend's got it but we played for about 5 minutes and decided to go play Popeye on Colecovision.

 

[defaultluser]

Atari was around when friends would only play Video Games inside (Arcades don't count) we would gather at a Friend's house. I can't remember which of my Friend's got it but we played for about 5 minutes and decided to go play Popeye on Colecovision.

yeah, agreed, the only reason I owned an Atari 2600 in the early 1980s was because you could get whole collections of crap for nothing, but all the games sucked equally

the second problem Atari had was the fact that the 5200 was late, and didn't distinguish itself at all from the coleco/intellivision,.. oh yeah, sand those crappy analog controllers

.

 

[kapone32]

yeah, agreed, the only reason I owned an Atari 2600 in the early 1980s was because you could get whole collections of crap for nothing, but all the games sucked equally

the second problem Atari had was the fact that the 5200 was late, and didn't distinguish itself at all from the coleco/intellivision,.. oh yeah, sand those crappy analog controllers

.

As I said before Pitfall was a special Game for Atari. There were others like Missile Command and Centipede. There was an Athletics Game released around the 84 Olympics that broke controllers like no joke. Thankfully my Dad was heavy into Consumer Electronics at the time and would fix them pretty easily. The Colecovision was head and shoulders above the Atari but the problem was the Games were garbage as there was not a lot of Japanese content at that time on console other than Donkey Kong and Pacman but they don't count as even Radio Shack had handheld versions of Galaga, Pacman and Donkey Kong clones. There was a DOS Gaming Company by the name of Sierra Online that was porting Japanese Games that were killer like Silpheed and Zeliard and Space Racer that were the main reason I never had an NES which does not make sense in some ways. That was corrected when I got my SNES in high school (with my own money) and here we are today but it all started (console) with Atari for me. Unfortunately nostalgia does not work with Games from those times. If studios need content to re release how about some of these classics with new Graphics but the best of them have already been updated too.

 

[80251]

I used to the MIDI files for silpheed, even though I never played the game. I got them off an old archive of Sierra Online music (I was looking for Kingsquest music), which I don't even know if it exists anymore.

 

[kapone32]

I used to the MIDI files for silpheed, even though I never played the game. I got them off an old archive of Sierra Online music (I was looking for Kingsquest music), which I don't even know if it exists anymore.

Silpheed was one of the most difficult Shumps of all time and satisfyingly good in all other regrads. You might be able to get the Audio file for Kings Quest on GOG.

 

[QuietBob]

I used to the MIDI files for silpheed, even though I never played the game. I got them off an old archive of Sierra Online music (I was looking for Kingsquest music), which I don't even know if it exists anymore.

Apparently, the site is still online: Sierra Music Central