This year marks 50 years since Pong showed up at a local bar near Atari’s headquarters and was repeatedly damaged because the coin mechanism was too full of quarters. It wasn’t the first video game, but it was the one that broke the gateways and created the gaming industry as we know it today. The current Atari has little to do with the innovative company of the past, but they have hired archive specialists at Digital Eclipse to create a collection of 90 games that will allow players anywhere to experience the full story of the game’s first party publisher game. Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is expected to be released later this year on Atari VCS, Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PC for $ 39.99.
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Atari 50: The anniversary celebration will include the games that people always think of when they hear the name Atari (although the full list of games has not been revealed). From Yar’s Revenge to Adventure, they are all on the list. However, the Atari 50 reaches out to more unknown parts of the company’s past to give a full look at the game’s history. For the first time, the games of Jaguar and Lynx will see the re-launch of modern consoles, which are joined by titles of 2600, 5200, 7800 and ST.
Digital Eclipse (known for the Mega Man Legacy Collection and the upcoming TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection) goes one step further with its latest retro compilation, presenting a huge list of included titles in an interactive timeline, along with 60 minutes of interviews with great minds from worldwide industry and developers who revived these classics. If all goes according to plan, players will listen to the creator, who gives context for a specific game 2600 and then will load directly to experience it for themselves before returning to the timeline. The collection also supports modern retro brackets as save states, which makes it easy to skip and experience everything Atari at your own pace, as well as reassign buttons, filters and borders.
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The Atari 50 also includes six new games that remaster or remix classics from the past. There’s a remake of Yar’s Revenge, a new entry in the Tank series called Quadratank, and a mix that celebrates vector-based games that are otherwise difficult to emulate in modern systems called Vctr Sctr. This rethinking is linked to Atari’s recent Recharged series, in which everything from Asteroids to Breakout received a modern makeover. According to Game Informer, the Atari 50 will also have the fourth chapter of Swordquest, called Airworld, a 3D isometric adventure based on Haunted House since 1982, and Neo Breakout, which is a combination of Breakout and Pong.
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