Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration

About once a decade or so since the 1980s there have been a few Atari compilations and a cartoonishly large amount of Atari Flashback mini-consoles. The usual slag of these games is how simple they are in gameplay and graphics. So many games in those collections you play for about 5 minutes and then you move on.

I feel like Atari 50 not only does a decent pick of the crop but goes above and beyond in a few areas, namely it pulls from the Atari arcades, 2600, 5200, 7800, the Atari Computer games, as well as 1990s systems the Atari Jaguar and Lynx which I don't think have ever been on any compilation.

Even better is that it gives all these games some context, many are placed on timelines and show the strides these games. Normally just having these games together lumped by genre or alphabetically gives them the personality of a Zip file you found online called "Atari-2600-COMPLETE". Will you ever really go through all of them? The timeline with its historical quotes, documentary footage and interviews help put things into place within the company's history. <spoiler>Starting off with early footage of Nolan Bushnell in a factory full of Pong machines and ending the timeline with the current president of Atari genuinely gives you a bit of emotional resonance with going through the whole thing</spoiler>. It's also nice that it's not all sugar-coated nostalgia, they gleefully announce the difficulty of working on some products and some things that show Atari in not the best of light.

There are a lot of games I've never played before that I quite enjoyed on the compilation but I only have a few nitpicks.

Due to rights issues, there are just some games that don't get picked up. Some just-forgotten games like Superman (the first action-adventure game?) for Atari aren't going to get included. Missing out on some other big licensed titles like E.T or Pac-Man (yes they are bad, but these are key parts of Atari history) aren't there. Some third-party games by Activision and Imagic are also things you just feel are missing. (What? Did Activision just want to sit on these titles they haven't released in 10 years?) Who knows who owns the rights to the Starpath Corporation titles either, which really made the Atari just do things you wouldn't imagine.

It's exciting to get Atari Jaguar, 8-bit computers, and Lynx games, but you kind of wish they had a few more, especially of Jaguar. Sure you get Tempest 2000, but then you just get some average to the very worst of what the Jaguar had to offer. No Jaguar CD games either. Would have loved to have Battlemorph or the Iron Soldier games.

Lastly, while it's alright to see how Asteroids and Missile Command evolved, getting the umpteenth variation of them for various systems is a bit of an eye-roller. I do however like most of the remakes of Break Out, Yar's Revenge, and the vector game tribute VCTR-SCTR. Not so crazy about Haunted Houses (endless tutorial blips) and Quadratank (hard enough to get someone to come over to play regular Atari games let alone this wobbly remake).

A really nice collection not unlike Rare Replay that doesn't just drop a bunch of rooms on you with some filters and maybe remaps the controls and calls it a day. I even recently picked up Castlevania Anniversary Collection for the Switch and despite it probably having higher-rated games, its presentation and history is limited to lore in cheaply displayed forms, the Atari 50 compilation was just such a bigger joy to explore and enjoy.