Digital Eclipse is preserving classic games in the most entertaining way possible

theverge.com:

The first game you play in The Making of Karateka, a release about the making of the cinematic action game Karateka, is an Asteroids clone. It may seem strange, but the attempt at recreating Asteroids was a seminal moment for Karateka creator Jordan Mechner, a humble beginning for a designer who would go on to create some of the most influential action games ever made, including Prince of Persia. The clone appears early on during a long, winding, and interactive timeline, which takes you through Mechner’s early days of experimentation before getting into how Karateka was developed and released.

For studio Digital Eclipse, the team behind the interactive documentary, it’s another attempt at telling the story of classic games in a way that’s completely native to the medium. As classic games become increasingly endangered, this approach is an important tool for keeping them alive. “I think it’s the best way to tell these stories,” says Digital Eclipse president Mike Mika. “If you’re going to tell the story of an interactive experience, it better be interactive.”

The studio made a name for itself over the years with thoughtful and detailed collections of retro games, ranging from Disney and Blizzard classics to the pixel art Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles titles. These packages offered not only excellent ports of the games themselves but also robust galleries of bonus materials like concept art and magazine ads.

But last year, Digital Eclipse released something more ambitious: Atari 50, which took all of that material, put it on an interactive timeline, and used it to tell the story of Atari’s first five decades of existence. It was like a museum on your console, letting you pick and choose what you wanted to experience but