The Holiday season is starting a little bit early for us, as Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration will be launching on Switch on 11th November.
Promised to be a special celebration unlike other compilations — and we can believe that statement when Digital Eclipse is behind the wheel — Atari 50 packages over 100 classic games together from the Atari 2600 all the way to the Lynx. This will be an anthology that brings together iconic brands, IPs, creators, and individuals, with the company's history all laid out in front of the player in various forms.
In today's brand-new trailer, Atari is celebrating the Jaguar, the system that featured two 32-bit chips and one of the strangest controllers we can remember. Sadly, it came out at a bit of a rough time — when the Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, and soon after the PlayStation, dominated the market.
Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is unlike any other video game collection, acting as a dynamic trek through the company’s history. Emulating seven separate Atari hardware platforms in one package, the title stands as a remarkable achievement accomplished by the Digital Eclipse team. The titles in the collection span five decades, including a library of over 100 video games, sorted by era, in an intuitive linear timeline, along with other files and materials, including early development sketches, hardware schematics, internal memos, pictures, films, and other "artifacts," the majority of which have never been made available to the public.
Additional Key Features:
- Expert Insight Through Storytelling: The collection is outfitted with a handful of various never-before-seen interviews with past-and-present Atari leadership 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.
- Playable History: The massive selection of over 100 games spans seven different platforms: Arcade, 2600, 5200, 7800, Atari 8-bit computers, and, for the first time ever on modern consoles, Atari Lynx and Jaguar! Play the classics like Tempest 2000, Asteroids, and Yars' Revenge, or dive into some deeper cuts.
- Reimagined and Revisited: The team at Digital Eclipse created six 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.
Well, it sounds like you'll be coming away from this an Atari expert by the time you've dug into every nook and cranny! We can't wait to travel back in time and experience Atari's past all over again — we'll have blankets and tea at the ready and we'll crouch on the floor, just like we used to as kids.
If you want to get an idea of what games will be coming in this compilation, you can check out the potential list from a retailer leak earlier in the year: