Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Review
Feelings of glee and wonder not unlike walking into an arcade full of classic games befell me as I booted up Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, gawking at its wide and varied wonders. This collection offers a completely new, very fun way to explore several decades of Atari arcade machines, consoles, handhelds, and PCs. With no musty old, red museum ropes to restrain me (only five of the 103 games require unlocking), I found myself not just absorbing, but exploring the past – like that chunky pixel in Adventure for the Atari 2600 gliding through rainbow-colored castles. Experiencing history in Atari 50 is like nothing else I’ve ever seen in any collection before, let alone a documentary, book, or a classroom. It’s all of those things in one, and a lot more fun!
If you’ve played a recent game collection, you know what they are about: A list of emulated games, sometimes presented with new save options, control schemes, and other adaptations – and often a sampling of digitized extras, like scans of box art. Atari 50’s creators, Digital Eclipse, are unparalleled collection creators. Their previous efforts, including the Mega Man Legacy Collection and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection came packed with art and unearthed design documents in addition to presenting very playable versions of emulated games. In Atari 50, the historical artifacts are not buried in an extras menu on the home screen. Here, the extras menu is a game itself. Presented as a branching timeline, a single point of interest might be a playable game, a short documentary, a slideshow, a scan, a quote, or an artifact, all adding to an irresistible completion percentage as you delve deeper.
And what artifacts they are! Holograms from a
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