Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration

Atari is a complicated company. For as important as they were to the birth of the video games industry, they are also the butt of a lot of jokes and nearly killed the industry they helped to start. They are the company that released the seminal Atari 2600, yet they also gave us the Jaguar. I’ve done the math, and for every good thing Atari has done, there’s at least one bone-headed decision that involved the company shooting themselves in the foot. All that history, both good and bad, is chronicled in a brand-new video game compilation called Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection. Featuring more than one-hundred games and hours of documentary-style interview footage, this is a fascinating history lesson that reveals Atari for what it is – an important, yet flawed company with high highs and extremely low lows. I hope you’re sitting down, because we have a lot of ground to cover in this review of Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection.

Atari 50 is more than a classic game collection. It’s an education. It’s an exhaustive look back at the birth of the arcade and game consoles, told by the people who were there doing the heavy lifting. It’s like going to a museum filled with more than one-hundred games that represent systems as diverse as the Atari 2600, Lynx, arcade, Jaguar and even the company’s short-lived line of computers. No matter if you’re a longtime fan or somebody who never owned an Atari product, you’re definitely going to come out of this game learning something about the company, the industry and the people who made some of the most influential games of all time.

With so much ground to cover, this history lesson could have been a real mess. Thankfully, Atari 50 is split up into five chapters, each covering one specific part of Atari’s past. We start out with the company’s arcade origins, which takes us through the early days and business decisions that started with Pong and continued with hits like Centipede, Tempest, Crystal Castles, Warlords and more. From there we go into the birth of the home console, which involved Atari developing the 2600 and supporting it with major arcade ports and must-have exclusives, such as Yar’s Revenge.

Of course, we can’t talk about the early days of the video games industry without diving into the Great Games Crash, which is covered in the third chapter. Here we see a company pushing the limits of what people expect from a video game, all while doing their best to survive an industry crash. That brings us to the fourth chapter, which switches gears a bit and focuses on Atari’s foray into the PC market. This is where we start to see the influence of Jack Tramiel, who was locked in a war against Commodore, a company he originally founded.

The final chapter looks at Atari’s post-crash output, which includes the 7800, Lynx and Jaguar. Here we see the one-time giant flailing around as they try to compete against the likes of Nintendo and Sega. We get a taste of their only portable system and dig into what made their final console 64-bits. It’s a reminder that, while initially maligned by critics and consumers, the Jaguar had potential and managed to release a number of games that pushed what was possible in 1993.

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What’s great about each of these eras is how the video interviews helped to put everything in context and explained the importance of each new game, console and computer. And it’s not just the standard stuff, like the inspiration behind Yar’s Revenge, because we get short videos on all kinds of subjects, including the Atari 5200’s backwards compatibility problem, Sam Tramiel’s love of the Lynx, the unexpected issues of being too successful and even a bit on Cosmos, the never-released holographic handheld. There’s an especially funny video where the different employees talk about the rampant drug use at Atari. The stories are legendary and confirm what we already know, that many of the best game concepts came from very high programmers.

It's great that some of the biggest names in Atari’s past were able to speak openly about their time at the company and what they worked on. We get fascinating interviews with legitimate legends, like Al Alcorn, David Crane, Eugene Jarvis, Garry Kitchen, Howard Scott Warshaw, Tod Frye and Jerry Jessop, as well as programmers who either started at Atari or were influenced by the company, such as Tim Schafer and Cliff Bleszinski. Hell, the game eventually veers into a discussion about 2600 homebrew games, which leads to an unexpected cameo by Ready Player One author Ernest Cline. He’s probably the weakest link here, but his contribution is immediately overshadowed by the next video, which gives us a few parting words from Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell.

What’s great about this collection is that it doesn’t stop at a few developer interviews and a couple of must-see TV commercials, but rather it goes that extra step by giving us a shocking amount of archival images and documents. We see hand-written game pitches, the results of a focus test, early concept art, promotional flyers, signed copies of games, wall posters, magazine scans and even full comic books. And before you ask, yes, every game comes with beautifully scanned versions of the original instruction manuals. It’s an absolute treasure trove of moments and memories from Atari’s early days, and I love how each picture or scanned image is given a short history lesson.

And it’s not always positive for Atari. What’s great about this compilation is that it isn’t afraid to address the company’s many bone-headed mistakes, especially when it came to Atari dealing with their programmers. You saw this when a group of disgruntled employees left the company due to low wages and started a small third-party you may have heard of called Activision. In another terrible move, Atari opted to give Missile Command developer Rob Fulop a certificate for one free turkey instead of a fat bonus check. This annoyed him so much that he left the company to co-found the publisher Imagic. And then there’s the Atari 5200 debacle, which left a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. Like I said at the top, it’s always one step forward, two steps back when dealing with Atari. And that’s what makes this warts-and-all history lesson so compelling.

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Well, that and the games. In all this excitement over the new interviews and archival documents, it’s easy to overlook that Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection is an absolutely massive compilation with more than one-hundred games to choose from. In fact, there’s almost too much for me to talk about in this review. As you can imagine, a lot of the emphasis is on the earliest days of Atari, both with the arcade games and the home console ports. We get dozens of Atari 2600 greats, including genuine classics like Adventure, Dodge ‘Em, Haunted House and, of course, Yar’s Revenge.

This leads to the more powerful Atari 5200 games, where we get hits like Millipede, Bounty Bob Strikes Back and Super Breakout. Of course, that’s just a short layover for the much better Atari 7800 library, which gives us some of the package’s best games. I’m talking about games like Ninja Golf, Fatal Run and Scrapyard Dog. Speaking of which, we also get the Lynx version of Scrapyard Dog, along with Turbo Sub and three other portable games.

While I love seeing the early console and arcade games, I was extremely excited to see the selection of Jaguar releases. Look, I’m not here to call this supposed 64-bitter the best system of the 1990s, but I do feel like it’s wrongly mocked and maligned. I love that this collection comes with Cybermorph, a 3D flying game that looks dated now, but was ahead of its time in 1993. Better still, we also get a port of Tempest 2000, which many fans argue is the best game the system has to offer. Other great titles include Missile Command 3D and Atari Karts, both of which hold up surprisingly well in the 21st century. There are a few duds, like Fight For Life, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy and Club Drive, but at least they are bad in an interesting way that makes them worth playing. Well, maybe not Club Drive. You can just pretend that one doesn’t exist.

What’s especially cool about this package is that it features a number of rare and never-before-released games that you can only find here. This includes the proposed (but never made) fourth installment in the Swordquest series, AirWorld, as well as a homebrew game based on Ernest Cline’s book Ready Player One. Atari 50 also includes brand-new updates to several old school classics, such as reimagined versions of Yars’ Revenge and Haunted House. These are not to be confused with Atari’s Recharged franchise, which covers similar ground. I would not call these reimagined games the highlight of this collection, but they are a fun new addition.

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Of course, that brings up one of the quirks of this compilation. Atari 50 is great when it comes to telling the history of the 1970s, 80s and even part of the 90s, but it kind of yadda-yadda-yaddas its way from 1998 to 2020. For a collection celebrating fifty years of Atari, there are two full decades that get completely ignored here. To be fair, including Driver, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up or that Alone in the Dark reboot may seem a bit out of place, but it’s incredibly jarring how this game just pretends like nothing happened in the 22 years between 1998 and 2020. They want you to celebrate 50 years, but hope you’ll ignore nearly half of that history. Odd.

Now, it could be that Atari doesn’t own the rights to a lot of the games from that era. In fact, that’s a thought I had while playing through this entire collection. I was disappointed that we didn’t see later Atari arcade games, like S.T.U.N Runner, Hydra, Rampart, Pit-Fighter and even Race Drivin’, but it could be that those are owned by a completely different company. The sad truth is that time has not been kind to Atari and a lot of their games and branding has changed hands multiple time in the last 50 years. This likely means that there are giant parts of Atari’s history that is completely missing in this collection, something that likely couldn’t be helped.

With more than one-hundred games spanning several decades, it’s awfully hard to complain about the lack of titles. We get a lot of genuine classics, a bunch of hidden gems and even a few misunderstood titles that have been reevaluated in recent years. That said, there are a bunch of games I wish would have found their way into the line-up. This is especially true for the Lynx, which only gets five titles. This collection is missing out on some of the portable’s showpiece titles, such as Blue Lightning, Warbirds, Rampart, Todd’s Adventures in Slime World, Dracula the Undead and maybe even Kung Food. The Lynx representation here is a little sad.

Despite missing some key games and completely ignoring large swaths of Atari’s history, this Anniversary Collection is pretty much everything you could want in a classic game compilation. The way the history is presented makes learning about Atari fun and engaging, and the package is filled with incredible archival material, cool pictures, fascinating interviews and more extras than you’ve ever seen in a game collection like this. It has all of the bells, whistles, options and surprises you could possibly want, and constantly goes out of its way to impress. This is not only one of the best video game compilations ever made, but it’s also one of the best things Atari has released in the 21st century.