It’s a big year for Atari, what with them celebrating their 50th anniversary and all that. And it’s a year when they are pushing out the boat in terms of new games. We’ve already seen a host of Recharged titles emerge onto the scene, but later in 2022 we’ll discover the biggest yet – Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.
Sold as an interactive Atari library that manages to blends the best from the past, the present and the future, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration will take players through the history of Atari like never before, delivering new content, classically inspired experimental games, interviews and a host of retro favourites.
Unveiled today by Atari, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is an interactive game experience that is coming this November to PC and consoles, namely Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch. Should you wish to dip in, you’ll discover a robust interactive history of Atari and the creative individuals who set the video game industry in motion told through a combination of classic and modern games, videos, and unpublished interviews.
“We cannot think of a better way to celebrate our golden anniversary than to share the decades of fun, innovation, and talent with our fans worldwide through this truly remarkable collection,” said Atari CEO Wade Rosen. “To say it’s an honor to bring this collection to life is an understatement. I speak for everyone at Atari when I say we are elated to share this new Atari experience with the world as our 50th-anniversary celebration.”
This is much more than just a collection of games though. Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is a true interactive history of the iconic publisher and a celebration of the small team in Silicon Valley who combined their creativity, curiosity, and passion, resulting in what would be Atari. It’ll take you through an interactive linear timeline, as players access a trove of over ninety video games organized by era, as well as various files and assets, including early development sketches, hardware schematics, internal memos, images, videos, and other “artifacts,” much of which have never been accessible by the public. Behind every game are the stories of Atari, what was happening at the company, what went into the creation of the games, and the hardware they ran on—told by the people who were there.
Unlike any other video game collection in existence, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration emulates eight different Atari hardware platforms in one package, something that has been made possible by the development team at Digital Eclipse. The collection includes titles drawn from five decades — a library of published works that represent the evolution of game development and the Atari games that influenced what would become the video game industry as we know it today.
The key features of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration include:
- Artifacts: A rich collection of discoverable photos, sketches, early marketing materials, and even classic console schematics are accessed by uncovering relevant points on the interactive Atari timeline, all of which put Atari’s library of games in historical context.
- Video Games by Era: Explore the Atari timeline and unlock games across decades as you learn the background of each, including their inception and the talented individuals behind the projects on six platforms: Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari ST, Atari Jaguar, and Atari Lynx.
- Bonus Games: Unlocked through completing challenges and uncovering certain Artifacts, bonus games include dozens of newly finished “never-completed” or unreleased games from the 1980s, experimental new versions of classic titles, and mash-ups that marry beloved early-era titles into a single, fluid experience.
- Expert Insight Through Storytelling: The collection is outfitted with a handful of various never-before-seen interviews with Atari leadership, past and present, as well as other prolific names in the games industry; complemented, of course, by the video game developers who helped raise Atari to become an industry icon.
- Reimagined and Revisited: The team at Digital Eclipse created five new games for the collection that reimagine some of the most beloved Atari classics or play on classic game themes, including Haunted House, Neo Breakout, Yars’ Revenge, Vctr Sctr, and the infamously never-finished Airworld.
Developed Digital Eclipse, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration will be available in November 2022 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Series X|S, PlayStation 4|5, and Windows PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.
If you wish to know more about how Atari are going big in 2022, hit up our exclusive interview with Wade Rosen, or check out our reviews of the Recharged games – Asteroids, Centipede, Black Widow, Breakout and Gravitar.
