Atari 50: The 50 year anniversary compilation game that honestly, is better left in your memory

I am an older gamer and being old doesn't bother me at all. I was around when the Atari 2600 hit the shelves and quickly became a part of nearly everyone's life. It was an exciting time to be around and since we had no expectations at all, every game, even really bad ones, were generally very welcome on the market. Of course Atari went too far with this and nearly crashed the entire industry in the early 80's with games like E.T.

I truly enjoyed the Atari days when I was a kid so when I saw that this compilation title was available that focuses on Atari games all throughout the company's existence from Pong to Atari Jaguar games, I was initially excited. After trying it out for an hour or so I am glad I was just playing it on someone else's system rather than having paid money for it myself.

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I will admit they did a very good job of creating a museum of sorts with the menu and I found this trip down memory lane and all the information they provided about the release date and a bit of information about what went into the game's creation to be quite interesting. They did this very well and if Atari had put this sort of effort into the creation of their games back in the 80's when they had no competition they might now have completely lost the plot and all of their customers.

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This was all a lot of fun to see and read and initially I was excited when a few games that I remembered really enjoying as a kid came up in the library I was excited to get in there and go for a trip down memory lane. Unfortunately, when I actually started playing the game I was quickly reminded about how far we have come since the 80's and how these games are extremely lame by the standards we have today.

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Haunted House for example was one of my favorite games on the 2600 and is dubbed by many as being the very first horror game ever created. The above picture is not out of focus, that is what the game looked like. I went through the same confusion as to what the hell you are supposed to do when I was playing it now, 40 years later, as I did when I first played it as a kid although now I was getting frustrated by the complete lack of direction that was going on. I mean, what the hell are you actually trying to accomplish in this? Back in those days if they even attempted to have an adventure game the instruction booklet was essential in explaining what the goal was and what various characters on the screen actually were. Everything just looked like a collection of squares back then because that is what they were.

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Other games in the library such as Jaguar games were a bit more interesting but sadly, it was also kind of a reminder that almost all of the very few "good" games that existed on that system were actually just ripoffs of popular titles that already existed on other, far more popular consoles. I was one of the few people that actually purchased an Atari Jaguar and one of the main problems that I faced was the near complete unavailability of the titles since stores were hesitant to stock them since almost nobody was buying them. I literally couldn't find most of these games for sale anywhere in the early 90's so for a bit anyway, it was fun to have access to almost all of them all at once. That was where the fun ended though.

Although I am looking at it through different eyes than I was back in 1993, these games are mostly pretty terrible and this is just one of the many reasons why Atari stopped existing as a company just a few years later.

I really wanted them to succeed back in those days because for reasons that I don't fully recall, I was an Atari fanboi... it was probably because they were the innovators and they were the only American company that existed in the market at the time. The company failed for a lot of good reasons though and most of it in retrospect was sheer incompetence.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are contemplating purchasing this collection of games, do so only out of wanting a nostalgic addition to your library and maybe get a physical copy. Basically every game in this collection is a piece of crap that after you get past the original "oh I remember what it felt like to play this for the first time!" you will grow bored and just want it to go away. Also, since many of the games are a mere 4Kb of data, the fact that this thing would ever have a loading time is just weird.

This collection is a fun piece of history because Atari actually WAS instrumental in bringing video games to the home market. It would have happened eventually anyway, but somebody needed to prove that it was financially viable to try. Atari, and this collection, is important in this regard. Unfortunately the games are just awful and therefore, this is something that you are very unlikely to play for any prolonged period of time.