Originally published at: This trailer for the Atari 50 collection will definitely make you nostalgic | Boing Boing
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As a child of the 70’s and 80’s, a lot of my life revolved around Atari, and later Intellivision and Colecovision and the others. I had an opportunity a few years back to visit Sunnyvale, CA for work, which I found was where the original Atari offices were. After work one day I excitedly drove over to the former HQ, which I assumed would have a big logo or something to mark its significance.
Nothing. Just another building like every other. Not a single shining pixel to represent all the greatness that once sprang from there.
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Previously:
For those who couldn’t be bothered to watch the trailer, the draw here is Atari Jaguar games, which I guess is something vaguely new – but I strongly suspect anyone who wanted to play Jaguar games has downloaded them illegally and gotten their fill of them already.
But then, who buys games to play them anymore? Games are for sticking in the backlog to fuel fond fantasies of having time to play them someday.
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I’m amused by their insistence that the games represent “all eras” of Atari. The thing is, that’s barely more than a decade - roughly 1983 to 1994, with an apparent focus on the last few years of that period. (I mean, yes, technically after that the name got sold off and Infogrames and others released games under the name, but they appear to not be counting that as an Atari “era,” which I suppose most people wouldn’t.)
In particular a sub-selection of the games that Atari developed or published for that system. Which is… not a lot. Nor does there seem to be much nostalgia for them. (I really don’t even recognize any of them.) The earlier console games got endless re-makes and clones, which the Jaguar games didn’t get. So it’s the usual Atari problem - their back catalog consists of games that either people have played to death or which they never cared about to begin with.
It didn’t have much to begin with, back when the company actually was there; game companies have always been pretty low-key - a consequence, I suppose, of not just being very much not customer-facing, but having an audience that’s heavy with teenage boys, so you really don’t want your end customers showing up because that’s nothing but a hassle. (And in America, they’re potentially showing up with guns… which has happened to game companies.) Now, of course, Atari is just one of many former tenants of the building, and there’s no point having a list of those at the site, confusing people.
Yeah, Atari HQ was pretty non-descript… except that employees could bring friends and families admission to the company arcade, with all their amazing cabinet games. Which you could play for free. I went several times around age 10. So so so rad.
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Wait, what people do that? /me whistles innocently
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