Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is a 2022 video game collection and interactive documentary created by Digital Eclipse and published by Atari to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Atari, Inc. The game includes new interviews with former Atari workers, old videos, games that work like the original ones from Atari’s history, and six new games inspired by classic Atari titles. It was released on November 11, 2022, for the Atari VCS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
The game is organized into five parts that show the history of Atari and its products through videos, scanned objects, and related games. Critics gave it mostly positive reviews, comparing it to a museum or traditional documentary. They praised how detailed it was and hoped other developers might get similar treatment.
After its release, Digital Eclipse added more games as free updates and paid extra content, later grouped into Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Expanded Edition. The game’s success led Digital Eclipse to create more documentary-style game collections, called the Gold Master Series.
Content
Atari 50 includes more than 100 video games originally made for arcades, handheld devices that work on their own, and game consoles such as the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx, and Atari Jaguar. Each original game has one way to save your progress. Players can change how the controls work, and a filter that makes the screen look like an old television can be turned on. Bezel designs add artwork around the screen to fill the wide display. Some games include extra features, such as Star Raiders, which has overlays showing player information and vibrations when entering hyperspace.
Six new "Atari Reimagined" games were created by Digital Eclipse staff for the collection. These games are newer versions of classic Atari titles, such as Yars' Revenge Reimagined, which uses the original game's code but adds more special effects and sound. VCTR-SCTR is a completely new game inspired by older games with vector graphics, like Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Battlezone, Speed Freak, and Tempest.
The game includes an interactive timeline that shows the history of Atari. The timeline is divided into five sections: "Arcade Origins," "Birth of the Console," "Highs and Lows," "The Dawn of PCs," and "The 1990s and Beyond." It covers Atari's beginnings in the 1970s, its first home console released in the 1970s, events before and after the video game crash of 1983, its home computer line, and its console releases in the 1990s.
The timeline includes historical documents, game manuals, background information about games, quotes from the past, and video interviews with game creators. Employees and former employees of Atari, such as Allan Alcorn, Owen Rubin, David Crane, Jerry Jessop, Bill Rehbock, Tod Frye, Eugene Jarvis, Howard Scott Warshaw, Nolan Bushnell, and Wade Rosen, are interviewed. Other game industry figures, like Cliff Bleszinski, Tim Schafer, and Ed Fries, are also featured. Users can also view the games in a list format, similar to other retro game collections.
Development
Chris Kohler became the editorial director at Digital Eclipse in July 2020 after Frank Cifaldi left the company. At the time, the team was working on a re-release of Jordan Mechner’s Karateka (1984). Kohler said this version was in a different stage of development compared to The Making of Karateka (2023). He studied Mechner’s college journals and found they could be used to tell the game’s history in order. Kohler wanted to show the game’s development timeline, including earlier games and prototypes that led to the final version. While working on The Making of Karateka, Digital Eclipse was also asked to create the Atari 50 compilation. They used the interactive timeline they developed for The Making of Karateka in Atari 50. The full title, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, refers to Atari’s 50th anniversary. Stephen Frost, the producer of Atari 50, said it was important to expand on previous compilations by telling Atari’s story and showing how its hardware influenced the arcade and video game industries. This led Digital Eclipse to use an interactive timeline with text, images, videos, and playable games to create a story. Engineers at Digital Eclipse built a system that allowed them to add material to the timeline without needing complex programming.
Some games could not be included in Atari 50 because Atari no longer had the rights to them. These included Marble Madness (1984), S.T.U.N. Runner (1989), and San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing (1996), which Warner Bros. owns after Midway went out of business. Other games, like Star Wars (1983), Alien vs Predator (1994), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982), were not included because they were tied to other licenses. Frost said they started the process to get permission to include some titles and art, which worked for games like Yoomp!. Some work began on an emulator for the Atari ST computers but was stopped when Frost decided there were not enough resources to complete it to a high quality.
Programmer Dave Rees said some Atari 2600 games needed special emulation. For example, Secret Quest required unique code to display a code-entry screen when a button was pressed. Rich Whitehouse created the Atari Jaguar emulator and said it was difficult because there were few written instructions about the system’s hardware, and those that existed had mistakes or missing details. Whitehouse said making the Jaguar run smoothly on the Nintendo Switch was a major challenge.
Digital Eclipse created six new games for Atari 50 based on Atari properties and the interests of team members. These games are called Haunted Houses, Neo Breakout, Quadratank, Swordquest: AirWorld, VCTR-SCTR (pronounced “Vector Sector”), and Yars’ Revenge Reimagined. Swordquest: AirWorld was made by Dave Rees, who worked with Tod Frye, who helped develop the original Swordquest games in the 1980s. Yars’ Revenge Reimagined was made by Mike Mika, who added more effects and sound to the original game. VCTR-SCTR is a new game inspired by vector graphics, created by Jeremy Williams, who made his own software to model 3D shapes. Haunted Houses was also made by Rees and used 3D and voxel-based graphics. Neo Breakout and Quadratank were made by Jason Cirillo and Mika, respectively.
Digital Eclipse collected video footage from The Strong, the National Videogame Museum, the Museum of Videogame Art, and private collectors for Atari 50. Kohler said there was plenty of footage, but they had to choose the most important parts for the story. All old videos were taken from original sources. Commercials for Atari were provided by Hans Reutter, including a scan of an old Atari movie advertisement.
On October 31, 2023, Atari announced it would buy Digital Eclipse. The deal was completed by November 6. A free update to Atari 50 was released on December 5, 2023, adding 12 games, including Bowling, Circus Atari, Double Dunk, Maze Craze, Miniature Golf, MotoRodeo, Super Football, and Warbirds, as well as two unreleased prototypes (Aquaventure and Save Mary) and two homebrew 2600 games (Adventure II and Return to Haunted House).
After Atari bought the Intellivision brand, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Expanded Edition was announced on June 24, 2024. This version added two new timelines: “The Wider World of Atari,” which includes 19 more games, a focus on Evelyn Seto, who designed Atari logos, and interviews with employees, fans, and homebrew developers; and “The First Console War,” which covers the competition between the Atari 2600 and Mattel’s Intellivision, with new videos and 19 additional games. “The Wider World of Atari” was released digitally on September 26, 2024, while “The First Console War” was released on November 8, along with a physical version for PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.
The games added in “The Wider World of Atari” are: Berzerk, Frenzy, Red Baron, Sky Diver, Avalanche, Destroyer, Super Bug, Football, Stellar Track, Submarine Commander, Steeplechase, Atari Video Cube, Desert Falcon (2600), and Off the Wall. The games added in “The First Console War” are: Air Raiders, Armor Ambush, Astroblast, Basketball, Frogs and Flies, International Soccer, Dark Cavern, Star Strike, Super Challenge Baseball,
List of games
The collection includes 115 games, plus 52 more that can be downloaded.
Reception
Atari 50 was released on November 11, 2022, for the Atari VCS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. According to Metacritic, a website that collects reviews, the release received "generally favorable reviews."
Critics praised the timeline structure of the release. Sammy Barker of Push Square said the timeline was thoughtful and engaging, and that Atari’s history was shown in an honest way, including both positive and negative aspects. Andrew Webster of The Verge agreed, saying the timeline made him more interested in learning about the games and their role in gaming history. Samuel Claiborn of IGN suggested that including more people, such as women developers, art and marketing teams, and journalists, could have added more context to the documentaries included.
Many reviewers noted that some of the games in the collection have not aged well. A reviewer from Edge magazine said the arcade games had both quantity and quality, but the Atari 2600 games did not hold up as well. The Lynx and Jaguar games were mostly seen as curiosities. Shaun Musgrave of TouchArcade said not every game was good, but each had something interesting to offer. He added that the extra information included helped people appreciate even familiar games more. Nick Thorpe of Retro Gamer said the content was improved by showing how it fits into Atari’s history. Webster noted that the collection allowed players to compare different versions of games, such as Dark Chambers and Scrapyard Dog, on various systems.
Claiborn said some games were better played with their original hardware, like Centipede’s trackball or Tempest’s spinner controls, but the Atari 2600’s control stick worked well. Edge magazine, Barker, Massey, Musgrave, and Thorpe mentioned that some historically important games were missing, such as Computer Space (1971), Firefox (1984), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and games for Atari ST computers. Graham Russel of Siliconera said the release did not include any discussion of Atari’s history or products made between 1998 and 2020, such as the Atari Flashback series.
Webster said Atari 50 was one of the best video game compilations released. Massey compared it to Capcom Arcade Stadium (2021), saying the latter had a 3D-rendered arcade style but lacked the warmth of Atari 50. Jason Fanelli of Game Informer and Thorpe said the compilation set a new standard for historical video game collections.
Legacy
In 2023, Digital Eclipse announced plans to use the timeline format from Atari 50 in other projects, under the name Gold Master Series. Kohler explained that the audience quickly understood the idea of exploring a timeline in Atari 50 to learn about history, which gave the team at Digital Eclipse confidence to continue using this format. The first project in the Gold Master Series was The Making of Karateka (2023), which told the story of the game Karateka (1984). Later releases included Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story (2024) and Tetris Forever (2024).