| Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration | |
| Developer: | Digital Eclipse |
| Publisher: | Atari |
| Platforms: | |
| Released: | November 11, 2022 |
| Producer: |
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| Composer: | Bob Baffy[2] |
| Genre: | Various |
| Modes: | Single-player, multiplayer |
Atari 50 (subtitled The Anniversary Celebration) is a video game compilation and interactive documentary about the history of Atari. It comprises newly shot interviews with former Atari employees, archival footage, emulated games from the company's catalog, and six new games inspired by past Atari games. It was developed by Digital Eclipse, published by Atari, and released on Atari VCS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in 2022, the 50th anniversary of Atari's founding. The main feature of the game is a five-part interactive timeline that lays out the history of the company and its products through video, scanned artifacts and related games.
Critics have compared Atari 50 favorably to a museum or traditional documentary. They praised its thoroughness and hoped other developers would receive a similar treatment. Digital Eclipse announced that they would be producing more "interactive documentary" compilations in the style of Atari 50 under the Gold Master Series with The Making of Karateka (2023) and (2024). Since its release, Digital Eclipse has added additional games as downloadable content and announced a new update which would include two new historical timelines and additional games for release in October 2024.
Atari 50 compiles 109 video games made for arcades, standalone handhelds, and game consoles, specifically Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar. Each of the original games is given a single save state. Controls can be remapped, and a CRT-like filter can be enabled, while bezels recreate art and fill out the wide screen. Some games feature further enhancements, such as Star Raiders, which has overlays that show player status and rumble effects when entering hyperspace.
Six new "Atari Reimagined" games were created for the collection by Digital Eclipse staff. These games are updated versions of Atari's games, such as Yars' Revenge Reimagined, which reuses the code of Yars' Revenge with more special effects and audio, while VCTR-SCTR is a completely new game inspired by vector graphics games like Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Battlezone, Speed Freak, and Tempest.
The game has a interactive timeline presenting the history of Atari. It is split into five categories: "Arcade Origins", "Birth of the Console", "Highs and Lows", "The Dawn of PCs", and "The 1990s and Beyond". It covers Atari's origin in the 1970s, its first home console released in the 1970s, Atari just before and after the video game crash of 1983, its home computer line and its console releases in the 1990s.
The timeline includes archival material such as design documents, game manuals, context for games, contemporary quotes and video interviews with game creators. Atari employees and former employees are interviewed in the collection, including Allan Alcorn, Owen Rubin, David Crane, Jerry Jessop, Bill Rehbock, Tod Frye, Eugene Jarvis, Howard Scott Warshaw, Nolan Bushnell and Wade Rosen, as well as other members of the game industry such as Cliff Bleszinski, Tim Schafer, and Ed Fries. The games included can also be browsed through a list as in most retro collections.
The game's editorial director, Chris Kohler, joined Digital Eclipse in July 2020 following the departure of Frank Cifaldi. The team were working on a re-release of Jordan Mechner's Karateka (1984), which Kohler described as being in a "different sort of prototype and in a different sort of state" than what would become The Making of Karateka (2023). Kohler went through Mechner's journals he kept while in college, discovering that the material could be used to chronologically tell the history of game's development. He wanted to place the game's history in a timeline, showcasing earlier games developed by the creator and prototypes of the game that would lead to its final form. While developing The Making of Karateka, Digital Eclipse were called upon to develop the Atari 50 compilation. As they had been already making an interactive documentary for The Making of Karateka, they applied what they had developed into Atari 50.Stephen Frost, producer of Atari 50, found that as there had been several compilations of Atari games, it was important to expand on the concept in a new release that would give the story of the company and how their hardware influenced both the arcade and video game industries. This led Digital Eclipse to apply the interactive timeline which presents text, images, video footage and playable games to form a narrative. The engineers at Digital Eclipse built a system that allowed them to add material in a timeline without extensive programming.
Some games could not be included with the release as Atari no long had the rights to them, such as the arcade games Marble Madness (1984), S.T.U.N. Runner (1989), and (1996), the rights to which belonged to Warner Bros. following the bankruptcy of Midway, which had previously had the rights to Atari Games. Other games that were not included were attached to other licenses, such as the arcade game Star Wars (1983), the Atari Jaguar game Alien vs Predator (1994), and the Atari 2600 game Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982). Frost explained that processes were started on getting permission to include certain titles and art assets for other games, which was allowed for games like Yoomp!. Some initial work was made on an emulator for the Atari ST line of computers, but halted when Frost concluded that there were not enough resources to complete the emulator to the quality required.
Programmer Dave Rees said that a few games for the Atari 2600 required unique emulation. These included Secret Quest, which uses the switch to display a code-entry status screen. This game required unique code to get it to toggle with a press of a button. Rich Whitehouse created the Atari Jaguar emulator and found it particularly challenging. Whitehouse stated that there was not a lot of documentation for the system's hardware, and what documentation did exist had inaccuracies or was missing information. Whitehouse stated that getting the system to run smoothly on the Nintendo Switch "ended up being its own challenge."
Digital Eclipse created new games for the compilation based on Atari properties and individual members' interests and expertise. These six new games are under the Atari Reimagined label. These are Haunted Houses, Neo Breakout, Quadratank, Swordquest: AirWorld, VCTR-SCTR (pronounced "Vector Sector") and Yars' Revenge Reimagined. Swordquest: AirWorld was developed by Dave Rees as an attempt to make a final game in the Swordquest series of games. He consulted Tod Frye, who worked on developing the game in the 1980s, on what the new version would be like. Yars' Revenge Reimainged was developed by Mike Mika. The game adds more effects and audio to the original game. VCTR-SCTR is a completely new game, inspired by vector graphics, by Jeremy Williams. Williams wrote his own software renderer that let him model vertices in a 3D space and connect them to form wireframes.[3] Haunted Houses was also developed by Rees and featured 3D and voxel-based graphics. Neo-Breakout and Quadratank were developed by Jason Cirillo and Mika respectively.
Digital Eclipse gathered video footage from The Strong, the National Videogame Museum and the Museum of Videogame Art and private collectors to include in the release. Kohler, said that there was no shortage of footage to draw from, but that they had to whittle the content down to what was important for the narrative. All archival footage is captured from original sources. Commercials for Atari were provided by Hans Reutter, including a film scan of an Atari theatrical advertisement.
There are 115 games available in the collection.
Atari 50 was released on November 11, 2022 on the Atari VCS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It garnered "generally favorable reviews", according to review aggregator site Metacritic.
Critics complimented the release's timeline structure, with Sammy Barker of Push Square proclaiming the timeline to be introspective and interesting, and that Atari's history was shown as a "warts and all perspective, which is appreciated". Andrew Webster of The Verge echoed this, stating that without the timeline structure he would have played these games "for a few minutes and then moved on; with it, I'm much more invested in understanding what they are and how they fit into gaming history, and I know what to look for when I dive in." Samuel Claiborn of IGN desired that more people be involved in the documentaries, such as the prominent women developers, Atari's art and marketing departments as well as decades of journalists, historians and collectors, saying this could have added further context.
Many reviewers commented that many of the games included have not aged well. A reviewer in Edge highlighted the arcade releases as having both quantity and quality, and said the Atari 2600 games have held up less well and that the selection of Lynx and Jaguar games were mostly curiosities. Shaun Musgrave of TouchArcade expanded that "not every game here is good, of course. But there's something interesting about each of them. Even the familiar old arcade and 2600 games that have been endlessly re-released can be appreciated a little more with the extra info attached in this collection." Webster complimented the variations on games, allowing audiences to compare games like Dark Chambers and Scrapyard Dog on different systems.
Claiborn found that some games had better ways to be played due the nature of the original hardware, such as Centipedes trackball, Tempests spinner controls, and the Atari 7800 and Jaguar controllers, but found that games for the Atari 2600 controlled better due the quality of the original system's control stick. Edge magazine, Barker, Massey and Musgrave lamented some historically important games missing, such as Computer Space (1971), Firefox (1984), one of the first Laserdisc-driven arcade games, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or any games for Atari ST computers. Graham Russel of Siliconera commented that the release lacked any discussion of Atari's history or products released between 1998 and 2020, such as the Atari Flashback series.
Webster said Atari 50 was among the best compilation video game titles released. Massey compared the compilation to Capcom Arcade Stadium (2021), finding that the title "comes with pretty 3D-rendered gimmickry that resembles an actual arcade, but lacks the internal warmth exuded [on ''Atari 50'']." Jason Fanelli of Game Informer declared it had set a new standard for historical video game compilations.
In 2023, Digital Eclipse announced they would adapt the historical timeline format used in Atari 50 into other projects, under the Gold Master Series branding. Kohler stated that the audience immediately picked up the idea of going through a timeline within Atari 50 and following the history, which gave the team at Digital Eclipse the confidence to continue with the format. The first Gold Master Series release was The Making of Karateka (2023), which chronicled the history of Karateka (1984) which was followed by (2024).
Atari announced on October 31, 2023 that they would acquire Digital Eclipse. Atari closed the deal by November 6, 2023. A free downloadable content (DLC) update to the collection on December 5, 2023 added 12 games, including two unreleased prototypes (Aquaventure and Save Mary), two homebrew 2600 games featured in previous compilations[4] (Adventure II, Return to Haunted House), and eight official titles (Bowling, Circus Atari, Double Dunk, Maze Craze, Miniature Golf, MotoRodeo, Super Football, and Warbirds).
Following Atari SA's acqusition of the Intellivision brand in May 2024, a second expansion and a new physical version of the game exclusive to the Nintendo Switch was announced in June 2024. These updates included new games and two new timelines. The first timeline included "The Wider World of Atari" which examines the development of Atari's logo and the making of Breakout. A second timeline titled "The First Console War" chronicles the rivalry between the Atari's Atari 2600 and Mattel's Intellivision which will include new documentary videos and a selection of M Network games. The update is scheduled for October 25, 2024, with owners of the release being able to receive the update as purchasable DLC.