Atari 50: the best retro collection

As a retro gaming enthusiast, I've really been enjoying the sheer volume of retro gaming collections that have been coming out these past few years. Some of my favorites have been the Disney Afternoon Collection, the Castlevania Collection (complete with the first official translation of the Famicom Kid Dracula game!), and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection. The Cowabunga Collection came out last Summer, and at the time I considered it to be the best collection of retro titles I'd seen so far. The scans of documentation on it are incredible! It's so cool to see design documents for the first TMNT game on NES, complete with sidebar translations. It makes me feel like I've found a treasure trove of information on my favorite games that I thought I'd never get the chance to see!

It's only been about half a year, and already Digital Eclipse, the team that made the Cowabunga Collection, have already topped themselves with Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration! This almost felt like reading an interactive book about Atari, and I mean that in the best way. Where as most collections just have the emulated games and hopefully some nice extras, this collection gives you a narrated timeline of Atari's history, complete with ephemera like ads, both print and TV, quotes, and new and archival interviews. Then it gives you the game. It really makes playing these games feel like something special. It gives the games context, which is especially important when it comes to some of the older 2600 games, which from an outside perspective may not seem that impressive.

One of my favorite experiences while playing Atari 50 was revisiting the Swordquest games again. Some background for those that don't know, Swordquest was a very ambitious idea from Atari to make an adventure game where players could win real treasure. By playing the games, and reading the included DC comics that gave much needed backgrounds about the world you were playing in as well as providing clues, players could solve puzzles in the game and send the information to Atari. Those players that answered correctly would then compete to win various treasures, unique to each of the four Swordquest games (Earthworld, Fireworld, Waterworld and Airworld). The treasure were each valued at $25,000 and were things like a crown or a chalice, made of gold and inlaid with rubies and gems. Then the winners would compete for the final grand prize, the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery, valued at $50,000. Unfortunately, Atari found themselves in a bad financial place by 1984 or so, and the last Swordquest game, Airworld, was never made, and the Sword was never won.

I'd known all of this before this collection, and I think at one time I had tried out one of the Swordquest games, and had found them too obtuse to be much fun. But this time, with all of the information you're given, and the fact that each DC comic of Swordquest can be read in it's entirety within the collection, I ended up getting much more interested in these games than I ever have before. It also includes a brand new Airworld game, based on design docs from Atari, and I genuinely want to try solving it.

The collection starts you with the arcade games Atari made from beginning to end, then it goes back and does the console games chronologically from the 2600 right up to the Jaguar and Lynx. I must say, Lynx had some fun titles, but there was not much that impressed me about the Jaguar. But I at least gave each game a try! There were some games that genuinely surprised me, like Howard Scott Warshaw's unreleased Saboteur, which was a lot of fun and it's shame it didn't come out when it was meant to. Also Tempest. Like, I know that's no hidden gem to retro gamers, but I never really got into Tempest before, but after giving it another go, I was all in on it and not sure why it never clicked before!

The only thing I found kind of 'meh' about the whole experience are the new games included in the collection, which are largely updated versions of existing games like Breakout or Tanks. Haunted House is one of my favorite Atari 2600 games, and I was excited to see a new version of it done in voxels, but I just couldn't get into it the way I do with the original. The only new game that hooked me was the newly made Swordquest: Airworld, which stuck to being a 2600 game instead of a new version of an old game.

I've made my way through the timeline entirely, but I know that there's a few games hidden in the collection too. You get cryptic clues for how to unlock them, which feels very Swordquest. I'm determined to not look them up and instead see if I can figure it out on my own! Overall, I've gotten plenty of Atari collections over the years, but nothing compares to Atari 50. If you're a fan of retro games, Atari games, or game preservation, this is such a good example of how to do it right!