Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration review

A fitting tribute to the company that filled arcades with Pong and homes with consoles, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration offers a comprehensive history and a decent selection of software.

Today, gaming is a 220 billion dollar giant, that’s roughly double the size of the film industry. Of course, the medium wasn’t always so massive. In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and fellow engineer Ted Dabney crafted one of the world’s first video arcade cabinets, Computer Space, in a spare bedroom. Sadly, in a world dominated by mechanical recreations like pinball tables, it baffled bar-goers and wasn’t the runaway success the creators had hoped.

This moment, as well as Atari’s subsequent innovations, are well documented in The Anniversary Celebration. Offering one of the most comprehensive interactive histories of the company ever created, the collection is filled with ambitious pioneers and ground-breaking advancements. Given the corporate-dominated climate of contemporary gaming, Celebration provides a fascinating chronicle of an era when a few plucky upstarts shaped gaming’s foundations.

Anniversary Celebration’s historic component delivers an encyclopedic summary of Atari’s history, organized across five chapters. Smartly, each is organized by a different period as well as topic, covering everything from Atari’s coin-operated roots, the smash success of 2600, the tumultuous console crash of the 1980s, the company’s computers, and subsequent sell-off of the Atari name and properties.

Filled with everything from photographs, documentary-style interviews, box covers, as well as access to the collection’s 100+ games, the anthology arrives without precedent. Sure, there has been a multitude of retro compendiums, but none have offered such a detailed dissection of history. Best of all the interactive timeline feels snappy, and you whiz past chronologically structured milestones, with many subjects inviting you on a deeper diver. So not only is there box art and a synopsis of 1982’s Demon to Diamonds, but a sub-menu offers a peek at the game’s advertising.

Interviews are far better than the average YouTube Q&A, with the team at Digital Eclipse obtaining oral histories from personalities like Al Alcorn, Garry Kitchen, David Crane, Eugene Jarvis, and Howard Scott Warshaw. They’re all wonderfully gregarious and surprisingly frank. One highlight is an overview of dissenting recollections about open drug use at Atari. It’s their own story, so frequently they outshine more modern notables like Tim Schafer, Cliff Bleszinski, or even Ready Player One author Earnest Cline. But even these folks deliver some of their best anecdotes, each revealing reverence for gaming’s past.

The result of The Anniversary Celebration’s warts-and-all approach is an abridged collection of games that shows Atari’s successes as well as failures. Licensing means there are some frustrating gaps in each system’s recreated catalog. The assemblage lacks games like the 2600’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Pac-Man, as well as Alien Vs. Predator for the Jaguar. But also missing are many of the works from third-party publishers like Activision, Imagic, and Mattel’s M-Network. Then there’s the arcade assemblage. Sadly, anything made after 1984 (such as Rampart, Paperboy, and Gauntlet) is owned by a separate company and isn’t included here.

There’s the occasional odd inclusion like Big Five Software’s Miner 2049er or the Atari Product Exchange’s Caverns of Mars (programmed by a high-school senior, Greg Christensen), but generally, these are subsets of Atari’s arcade, 2600, 7800, and Jaguar libraries, along with three petite quintets of 5200, Lynx, and Atari 800 titles. If you played any of the original consoles, nostalgia will probably materialize, but so will memories for all the titles not included here.

Expectantly, the emulation is all top-notch, offering amenities like different aspect ratios, an optional filter, border images, and even flawless scanned instruction manuals. Many of the titles will probably be completely archaic to modern gamers, while retro fans have access to these games from a previously released anthology. Surprisingly, the software tells its own story, with 90’s Atari attempting to mimic rather than invent. Titles like Scrapyard Dog, Cybermorph, and Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy demonstrated the company delivering halfhearted imitations of Mario Bros., Star Fox, and U.N. Squadron.

But look beyond the abridged Lynx library and disappointing Jaguar enemies and there are a few threats to be uncovered. Haunted Houses, Neo Breakout, and Yars’ Revenge remake a trio of classic 2600 titles, Vctr-Sctr is a cool, simulated vector graphics mashup of Asteroid, Lunar Lander, Tempest, and Battlezone. Swordquest Airworld finally concludes the aborded series, while Quadratank riffs on Combat. In addition to a recreation of Atari’s early Touch Me handheld and prototype arcade title Akka Arrh. Hidden in the 100 or so game collection are six unlockables, as well.

If The Anniversary Celebration’s collection of games was as comprehensive as its interactive timelines, the package might just flirt with faultlessness. But unfortunately, game licensing has shattered any hopes for an inclusive anthology. Inevitably, gaming grew up and moved from bedrooms and garages to corporate suites. Atari 50 skillfully documents that journey and for that, it will be an essential pick-up for players of a certain age.

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration was played on
Switch with review code provided by the publisher.