Atari 50 – The Anniversary Celebration

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is a 2022 video game compilation and interactive documentary developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Atari to commemorate the company’s 50th anniversary. It is composed of newly shot interviews with former Atari employees, archival footage, emulated games from the company’s catalog, and six new games inspired by various Atari games. It was released for Atari VCS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on November 11, 2022.

The game is presented as a five-part interactive timeline that lays out the history of the company and its products through video, scanned artifacts and related games. It received generally favorable reviews, with critics comparing it favorably to a museum or traditional documentary. They praised its thoroughness and hoped other developers would receive a similar treatment. Since its release, Digital Eclipse has added additional games as free updates and paid downloadable content, later compiled into Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Expanded Edition. The success of the game led Digital Eclipse to develop additional documentary-style game compilations, known as the Gold Master Series.

Atari 50 compiles over 100 video games made for arcades, standalone handhelds, and game consoles, specifically Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar. Each of the original games is given a single save state. Controls can be remapped, and a CRT-like filter can be enabled, while bezels recreate art and fill out the wide screen. Some games feature further enhancements, such as Star Raiders, which has overlays that show player status and rumble effects when entering hyperspace. Six new “Atari Reimagined” games were created for the collection by Digital Eclipse staff. 

These games are updated versions of Atari’s games, such as Yars’ Revenge Reimagined, which reuses the code of Yars’ Revenge with more special effects and audio, while VCTR-SCTR is a completely new game inspired by vector graphics games like Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Battlezone, Speed Freak, and Tempest. The game has an interactive timeline presenting the history of Atari. It is split into five categories: “Arcade Origins”, “Birth of the Console”, “Highs and Lows”, “The Dawn of PCs”, and “The 1990s and Beyond”. It covers Atari’s origin in the 1970s, its first home console released in the 1970s, Atari just before and after the video game crash of 1983, its home computer line and its console releases in the 1990s.

The timeline includes archival material such as design documents, game manuals, context for games, contemporary quotes and video interviews with game creators. Atari employees and former employees are interviewed in the collection, including Allan Alcorn, Owen Rubin, David Crane, Jerry Jessop, Bill Rehbock, Tod Frye, Eugene Jarvis, Howard Scott Warshaw, Nolan Bushnell and Wade Rosen, as well as other members of the game industry such as Cliff Bleszinski, Tim Schafer, and Ed Fries. The games included can also be browsed through a list as in most retro collections.