In recent years, I've become a big fan of videogame documentaries and books. Not the making-of things that publishers have created to promote a new release, and paint everything in a glowing light, but the retrospective deep dives that give us a better understanding of how and why games turned out the way they are. My top recommendations would be Darren Wall's Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, From Bedrooms to Billions: The PlayStation Revolution, Playing with Power: The Nintendo Story and Power On: The Story of Xbox. They all have flaws, and none of them are definitive, but they all do a great job of shining light on the creative decisions and constraints that lead to the consoles that shaped the industry. One of the biggest outliers in this has been Atari, who were the company that turned some exciting computer experiments into a business. Instead of a book, film or TV series, they've opted to do what's in their nature and sell us a videogame.
There are aspects of Atari 50 that are really terrific. The menus take you through a linear history of Atari, chronicling releases and events through archival footage, newly recorded interviews, scanned documents, incredible artwork - and importantly - playable games. The start of this timeline gives a really strong impression, with 1973 footage of Nolan Bushnell walking through a warehouse of newly-produced Pong cabinets, and insight into just what these people were working with as they introduced the general public to videogames. Each game is framed with archival material, developer interviews and advertisements that give us a far better impression of their intentions and how they were met than just giving us a ROM and leaving a 2022 audience to make their own impressions, ignorant of what each game really is.
This naturally becomes less of a factor as the seventies shift to the eighties, when licensed titles that Atari don't have the rights to rerelease, and third-parties become more important to the Atari 2600's history than the first party line-up. I'm no Atari enthusiast, but I could see the massive gaps in the story. E.T. and Pac-Man coverage essentially amounts to a photo of the landfill, and Activision appear to have no interest in having anything to do with this release. Regardless, it's still a great place to learn about the console. I've gained new respect for what developers were able to produce on a system where programmers had to write code around where the CRT gun was drawing as it produced each new frame, sixty times a second. People weren't making Secret Quest because they were too stupid to make Grand Theft Auto V. It took incredible skill, patience and imagination to produce this stuff.
This declining insight carries us through the rest of the eighties, and into the nineties, and the Jaguar titles seem like a novelty for PR rather than something that was considered part of the remit. We're rarely given any insight into how these titles were made, what they were intended to accomplish, or the competition they were up against. There's no Atari ST games here, which from a European perspective, seems like a massive oversight. This is mainly an American product for nostalgic boomers, and serves limited purpose for videogame fans interested in the industry's history.
Then there's how it fares as a compilation. The framing device really works well to give players appreciation for the games on offer. Atari aren't a Nintendo or a Namco or a Sega, though. They aren't sitting on a treasure trove of undeniable all-time classics. They're an important part of videogame history, and it's great to get to play a lot of these games, but there's not many that you're likely to come back to afterwards. What's most disappointing is how they've opted to emulate paddle controls. Much of Atari's earliest games relied on an analogue dial to control paddles, and I insist that if you give players an appropriate alternative, Pong, Breakout and Warlords can still be a great time for modern audiences. That's not really the case with how Atari 50 presents them, with jumpy, unreliable control. Analogue controllers do a far better job of emulating trackballs, though, and I've come away from Atari 50 as a new Missile Command fan. The blunt brutality of its subject and presentation still connects, and the increasing desperation from players as they attempt to hang onto their remaining missiles and silos, pre-empting how the strikes will land, is really great. It's a political Space Invaders, and far better for it.
Irrespective of how little the documentary side of the package seems to care about them, the later games are still interesting. I now feel like I've got a personal connection to how shite the Jaguar truly was. How completely out of their depth Atari were in launching Club Drive and Fight for Life against Ridge Racer and Virtua Fighter 2. Tempest 2000 is still pretty cool, but it's a shame they didn't go a little further in working with Jeff Minter and include 3000 or TxK. I know there were better Jaguar games, but you're not going to find Aliens vs Predator or Cannon Fodder in a 2022 Atari release.
Then there's the "Reimagined" tribute titles that have been included. They're very curious, sitting on the timeline alongside their primary inspirations. They feel like those out-of-touch arcade revivals we got in the 90s and 2000s, like the PS2 Defender or PS1 Centipede, and they're likely the result of commercially unviable projects for that new VCS that you already forgot was a thing. I know Atari love Haunted House, and see it as a direct progenitor of Resident Evil, but I fucking don't. A newly-produced release of the final SwordQuest game, "Airworld" is here, but I'm unconvinced that if it had come out in 1984, it would have included a Flappy Bird minigame. "VCTR-SCTR" is a kind-of-cool tribute to Vector-based arcade games, shifting between homages to Asteroids, Lunar Lander and Tempest, almost WarioWare style, but it feels out of place alongside a visually enhanced version of Yar's Revenge that boasts it's still built on 2600 code. In fact, why are these here at all, and not Atari's cloying post-Jaguar attempts? These count as historical, but PS1 Pong and 2008 Alone in the Dark don't?
So, it's a mixed bag. Maybe this team could have put out a really great series of videos covering Atari's history, but licencing issues become a bigger problem when releasing it as a game. I don't think it sells itself to new players on the strength of its library, though those who grew up playing Atari games in the 70s and 80s might be pleased with what's on offer. I think its strongest parts are solid enough to pave over its shortcomings and missed potential though. As I said in the opening paragraph, none of these releases are definitive or without flaws, and if you can find a reasonable price on Atari 50, it can stand as one of the more interesting entries in that line-up.
There are aspects of Atari 50 that are really terrific. The menus take you through a linear history of Atari, chronicling releases and events through archival footage, newly recorded interviews, scanned documents, incredible artwork - and importantly - playable games. The start of this timeline gives a really strong impression, with 1973 footage of Nolan Bushnell walking through a warehouse of newly-produced Pong cabinets, and insight into just what these people were working with as they introduced the general public to videogames. Each game is framed with archival material, developer interviews and advertisements that give us a far better impression of their intentions and how they were met than just giving us a ROM and leaving a 2022 audience to make their own impressions, ignorant of what each game really is.
This naturally becomes less of a factor as the seventies shift to the eighties, when licensed titles that Atari don't have the rights to rerelease, and third-parties become more important to the Atari 2600's history than the first party line-up. I'm no Atari enthusiast, but I could see the massive gaps in the story. E.T. and Pac-Man coverage essentially amounts to a photo of the landfill, and Activision appear to have no interest in having anything to do with this release. Regardless, it's still a great place to learn about the console. I've gained new respect for what developers were able to produce on a system where programmers had to write code around where the CRT gun was drawing as it produced each new frame, sixty times a second. People weren't making Secret Quest because they were too stupid to make Grand Theft Auto V. It took incredible skill, patience and imagination to produce this stuff.
This declining insight carries us through the rest of the eighties, and into the nineties, and the Jaguar titles seem like a novelty for PR rather than something that was considered part of the remit. We're rarely given any insight into how these titles were made, what they were intended to accomplish, or the competition they were up against. There's no Atari ST games here, which from a European perspective, seems like a massive oversight. This is mainly an American product for nostalgic boomers, and serves limited purpose for videogame fans interested in the industry's history.
Then there's how it fares as a compilation. The framing device really works well to give players appreciation for the games on offer. Atari aren't a Nintendo or a Namco or a Sega, though. They aren't sitting on a treasure trove of undeniable all-time classics. They're an important part of videogame history, and it's great to get to play a lot of these games, but there's not many that you're likely to come back to afterwards. What's most disappointing is how they've opted to emulate paddle controls. Much of Atari's earliest games relied on an analogue dial to control paddles, and I insist that if you give players an appropriate alternative, Pong, Breakout and Warlords can still be a great time for modern audiences. That's not really the case with how Atari 50 presents them, with jumpy, unreliable control. Analogue controllers do a far better job of emulating trackballs, though, and I've come away from Atari 50 as a new Missile Command fan. The blunt brutality of its subject and presentation still connects, and the increasing desperation from players as they attempt to hang onto their remaining missiles and silos, pre-empting how the strikes will land, is really great. It's a political Space Invaders, and far better for it.
Irrespective of how little the documentary side of the package seems to care about them, the later games are still interesting. I now feel like I've got a personal connection to how shite the Jaguar truly was. How completely out of their depth Atari were in launching Club Drive and Fight for Life against Ridge Racer and Virtua Fighter 2. Tempest 2000 is still pretty cool, but it's a shame they didn't go a little further in working with Jeff Minter and include 3000 or TxK. I know there were better Jaguar games, but you're not going to find Aliens vs Predator or Cannon Fodder in a 2022 Atari release.
Then there's the "Reimagined" tribute titles that have been included. They're very curious, sitting on the timeline alongside their primary inspirations. They feel like those out-of-touch arcade revivals we got in the 90s and 2000s, like the PS2 Defender or PS1 Centipede, and they're likely the result of commercially unviable projects for that new VCS that you already forgot was a thing. I know Atari love Haunted House, and see it as a direct progenitor of Resident Evil, but I fucking don't. A newly-produced release of the final SwordQuest game, "Airworld" is here, but I'm unconvinced that if it had come out in 1984, it would have included a Flappy Bird minigame. "VCTR-SCTR" is a kind-of-cool tribute to Vector-based arcade games, shifting between homages to Asteroids, Lunar Lander and Tempest, almost WarioWare style, but it feels out of place alongside a visually enhanced version of Yar's Revenge that boasts it's still built on 2600 code. In fact, why are these here at all, and not Atari's cloying post-Jaguar attempts? These count as historical, but PS1 Pong and 2008 Alone in the Dark don't?
So, it's a mixed bag. Maybe this team could have put out a really great series of videos covering Atari's history, but licencing issues become a bigger problem when releasing it as a game. I don't think it sells itself to new players on the strength of its library, though those who grew up playing Atari games in the 70s and 80s might be pleased with what's on offer. I think its strongest parts are solid enough to pave over its shortcomings and missed potential though. As I said in the opening paragraph, none of these releases are definitive or without flaws, and if you can find a reasonable price on Atari 50, it can stand as one of the more interesting entries in that line-up.