Let’s all take a walk down memory lane, looking back over the past 50 years with the classics we all used to play when we were young. Digital Eclipse has made this all possible with their latest title, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.

The first thing you notice when booting up this treasure is the main menu, it’s beautiful in itself, and the first couple of options take you through the past 50 years. The main menu has 5 options that present as an interactive experience, showing you how Atari became what it is today and giving you a lesson in its history.

Arcade Origins is the first option within the five available, showing you the earliest days when arcade machines were first becoming a thing and introducing timeless classics like Pong, and you can tell that the team at Atari prides themselves on their arcade machines and music visualizations.

The second option is the Birth Of The Console, the era that changed how we interacted with our TV sets, which, if it’s not already obvious, was a great success. The Highs And Lows take place during the mid-80s, back when Atari was releasing excellent games, but the video game business was struggling to stay afloat.

The Dawn Of PCs goes into detail on people not just thinking of the Atari as a gaming console, but as their first home computer, even if its sole purpose was to play games at home. The last interactive learning experience is The 1990’s And Beyond, which is around the time the video game industry made its comeback, and Atari was there to help where it could, with new games for the Atari 2600, as well as the new Lynx and Jaguar consoles.

I’d highly recommend taking some time to go through the slides and watch all the videos in the interactive experience because you can learn a lot about the gaming industry over the past 50 years. These interactive experiences are pumped full of content never seen before.

The interactive experience is not the only thing this title has to offer. The part we all came for is the giant library of games that comes with it. There is a wide range of games from their earliest classics to the gems from the ’80s and ’90s, but the one thing that stood out to me most was the 6 new titles they have added in, so anyone who has not played Atari before can experience a new game with the old feel.

The list is made up of over 100 playable games, not including the new ones, and some of the included games were rare back in the day, and they date back from the Atari Jaguar and Lynx platforms, 8-bit computers, and the 7800, 5200, and 2600 consoles.

I was worried about how the games would control on the new consoles because back in the day, you used a very simple joystick, but I was wrong to be worried. The games all transferred brilliantly and were perfectly mapped on the Xbox controller. There were a couple of games I needed to figure out the controls for, but once you get past that little speed bump, things become very, very simple. The games, even though we all know they’re old, felt like they were created to be played on the current generation of consoles.

The main menu in this game blew me away with the art style used, and the styling of the menu had that old-school vibe with a hint of new-school to even things out. The games themselves were true to what they used to be with the variations of graphics over the years, whereas the new titles added to this collection were visually stunning, and again, they had the old-school vibe to them, but they had a more modern touch to them, so you knew it was new. The audio is everything you could expect from arcades and 8-bit systems; all the true sounds from the titles of old, but they also seemed like they’d been remastered, because they sounded a lot better than I remember.

Depending on if you are new to gaming and want to test the waters with some old-school games, or you’re like me and used to play the Atari consoles back in the day, this title is for you. Revisiting memories from when things were simpler offers endless hours of fun, and this collection is a great way to honour how it all began.

Written by: Hayden Nelson