Review: Atari 50 - The Anniversary Celebration

Price: £34.99 eShop, PSN

Developer: Digital Eclipse

Publisher: Atari

Players: 1-2

Poor Atari, the golden child of video gaming, then the spotty angsty teenager of home computers, before finally settling up as the deadbeat shouting abuse and selling faded memories outside a booze store. Don't mock, it could happen to any of us. But, finally, someone has taken the care to tell Atari's story properly. 

With a glorious romp through the heyday of video games to the trials and tribulations of corporate ownership, and those bleak end of days times, this is a great tale, well retold. In among the art, video tales, adverts and talking heads are plenty of the classics, including some unreleased prototypes from the Atari archives. 

Stars of the show are a set of great retro-modern reincarnations, and - finally - an easy, cost-effective, way to play a few Jaguar (including the mighty Tempest 2000) and Lynx games (wish I'd never binned/sold mine, but there you go! I do have to fit in a nod to Evercade's Lynx efforts, of course.)  

I think my only gripe at the documentary content is that this is a US-only show, no Jeff Minter tripping about Tempest, Daryl Still manfully running the UK Atari PR office, or Jane Whittaker peering around corners in Alien vs Predator. This always irks me about talking-heads shows, especially in the Zoom age, it would be so easy to do and deflect from the Californian bromance tone. 

But on with the games. Thanks to Evercade, I've played a lot of the VCS/2600-versions but only a few of the arcade originals. Which makes Atari 50 great, a way to see, almost touch and feel, the legends of gaming. From Lunar Lander to the madness of Food Fight and the rise up the visual fidelity-o-meter to I, Robot, everything is a bit of a voyage, no matter how simple the game, with over 100 titles to (re)discover. 

Finding out little gems about the development process, the art behind each game, is all good fun. And the UI for each game is great with more info, settings, screen filters and zoom modes. I particularly love the massive Atari Lynx pixels kicking that 160×102 resolution up to HD. And we can save games to preserve those high scores or progress. 

Topping the collection off is VCTR-SCTR, a love letter through the pixels. vertexes and polygons into the modern age of gaming, and something that could easily get a solo release. Obviously, there's lots missing here, with licensing issues and so on, but where the hell is Gauntlet? Hopefully some DLC to expand the roster, or a second collection will dig further into the archive. 

Everyone will have their own version of this story, so there's no point ragging on perceived weak spots or cheering on my favourites. That said, Ruiner on the Jaguar and Turbo Sub on Lynx, Bounty Bob and Gravitar - welcome back! Final thought, this must have been such a fun project to work on! 

Score - 5/5 (played on PS5, available on Switch, PS4 and Xbox) 

Cybermorph looked so good in 1994 for £199