Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Review: A Celebration To Remember

One of my favorite revivals of the last few years has been the return of retro collections. These were common in the late 90s and early 00s, but around a decade ago, they looked all but dead, with most developers having decided that it was more financially lucrative to sell classic games as one-off releases on the Virtual Console, Xbox Live Arcade, and in other similar formats. I get the appeal, if you want a specific game, you can buy just that game. Because of that, though, the prices of those individual games were a lot higher. I’d much rather get an extensive collection where I’m paying under a dollar per game than pay ten bucks each.

With Nintendo doing away with the Virtual Console on Switch and Microsoft no longer giving digital releases a special spotlight, collections have returned, with all the advantages they bring. It isn’t just pricing. Collections that are themed around something important at their best offer the opportunity to put games in context with documentary features, historic documents, artwork, and more that never end up in those individual releases. Collections also offer a chance for players to sample a wider variety of games. While the biggest name games can support a solo release and reach players, the vast majority of retro games simply don’t have the name recognition to find a significant audience this way, and when that’s the primary business model, it risks developers not even bothering to release them.

A Roadmap Forward

The team at Digital Eclipse has been putting out retro collections themselves since the mid-90s, but Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is perhaps the best effort in their long history. Designed almost as a museum exhibit, it tracks Atari’s history from the earliest days of gaming through the death of the company in its traditional form in the 90s and even the version of Atari that exists today. It’s truly a celebration of the company and, by proxy, of the origins of video games.

When you hop into Atari 50, you’ll find yourself on a timeline. You can jump between different eras, highlighting Atari’s earliest days in the arcade, the rise of the 2600, their struggles in the 80s with the 5200 and 7800, the era of Atari PC hardware, and even the company’s final days as a hardware maker with the Lynx and Jaguar in the 90s. Each of these periods is packed with content, only some of it being video games. As you move along the timeline, you’ll find videos highlighting everything from the early days of Pong, to finding the original arcade cabinet for Computer Space, the first arcade game, to even talking about drug use at Atari. Tons of fascinating stories are highlighted, stories which give the games present here context and meaning even when they’re not always very good. There are pictures of the creators behind the scenes, and high-resolution art used on the packaging, not to mention the packaging itself. You even have full comic books created for some of these games represented.

History Unveiled

As you move along the timeline, though, you’ll find games highlighted as well, and the vast majority of them are fully playable, though a few showing up without the option to play them is a strange choice. When you jump into a game, you can go into a menu where you can create save states, customize controls, change the screen size and background, and just customize the heck out of your experience. There are plenty of classics here, of course, games like Asteroids, Breakout, Lunar Lander, Centipede, and more. You also have a lot of underappreciated classics represented, the type that could never support their own release but shouldn’t be forgotten.  Games like Sprint 8, Food Fight, Miner 2049er, and many more. These games consistently run great, and the context given to them often adds interest.

There’s even a set of newly designed versions of some of these retro games. Most of these try to act like modern-day sequels to games, including Haunted House, Breakout, and Yars’ Revenge. They’re neat, though none of them are genuinely great games in themselves. The developers also emulated the Touch Me handheld system from the 70s and even created a fourth Swordquest game to finally complete the series that ended without a planned fourth installment. The effort is greatly appreciated.

It Comes Down To Games

Atari 50 does almost everything right, but one major thing holds it back. Ultimately, it comes down to the games themselves. Many of these games simply don’t hold up that well in 2022, or in the case of most of the Jaguar games featured here, they were never any good. There’s still plenty of games that are fun to play today, but most of them are fun in a play for five minutes and then move on to something else sort of way. The Jaguar lineup has few redeeming titles, though at least Tempest 2000 is available. Most of the excellent Atari 2600 games that offered more depth and still hold up to a degree, games like Pitfall, H.E.R.O., and River Raid, are missing.

It’s not a coincidence that so many of these were made by Activision, but it’s a real shame that a deal couldn’t be struck to get these games included. There’s a tab about the efforts of third parties like Activision and Imagic on the system, but they don’t replace having the actual games here. The Jaguar has a surprisingly high number of games included, but outside of Tempest 2000, I’d hesitate to call any of them good. Most of its best games seem to be missing, thanks to licensing as well. The Lynx is barely represented at all, with only a few games present. Everything around the games here is fantastic, but the game lineup itself is simply lacking in a few too many places to be the ultimate Atari package this could have been.

Conclusion

The team at Digital Eclipse has done some of their finest work with Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. Creating a collection that could quite easily be translated into a museum exhibit, they’ve set a new standard for the presentation of retro collections, one I hope future collections will follow. While ultimately held back from being the ultimate Atari package, it could have been by holes in the game lineup, Atari 50 is still a fantastic experience. It’s just one that all but the most die-hard Atari faithful will enjoy for a few afternoons before moving on. Still, even those who have never held an Atari joystick could benefit from those few afternoon sessions as they take a crash course through a fascinating history.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: Xbox Series X(Reviewed), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Switch PC; Publisher: Atari; Developer: Digital Eclipse; Players: 4; Released: November 11th, 2022; ESRB: T for Teen; MSRP: $39.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration provided by the publisher.