Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebrationis the gift that keeps on giving. Or selling, in any case. Since its launch in 2022, the collection, which encompasses an outstanding medley of tons of Atari classics, unreleased prototypes, and even after-market homebrews, has been supported by two big expansions. Between ‘The First Console War’ and ‘The Wider World of Atari’, the impressive 115-game catalog has expanded to 153.
Three years later, and Atari 50 is still going strong with ‘The Namco Legendary Pack’. Unless the developers are holding back some surprises, it’s a much slimmer offering than prior endeavours, but it’s still got me salivating for another round of fascinating early-industry titles and even more of the archival footage and in-depth interviews that made The Anniversary Collection so memorable to begin with.
Namco’s Early Days Join The Ranks
One of the coolest things about Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection has been its ‘timeline’ system, which explores Atari’s history with various outside forces. The level of detail on display isn’t just delicious junk food for those of us who are into studying the gaming industry’s nascent moments; it’s some of the finest morsels I’ve seen.
The Namco Legendary Pack features another big branch showcasing how Namco’s release catalog affected the various Atari console generations. Of course, several of these games are fully playable, including three Atari versions ofPac-Manthat have never been re-released on any subsequent home consoles.
On tap is the following trio: Pac-Man 2600, Pac-Man 5200, and Pac-Man 8-bit. There’s also the U.S. arcade versions of both Dig Dug and Xevious, as well as Galaga, Galaxian, and the console-specific renditions of the aforementioned Dig Dug and Xevious.
Separately,the company has announced the Atari 2600+ Pac-Man Edition, its latest hardware launch. This one’s armed with (naturally) Pac-Man 2600 plus theall-newPac-Man 7800. Gaming’s greatest yellow sphere of a lad is having a pretty great time of it lately, most notably via the bizarre Metroidvania-infused revamp,Shadow Labyrinth-which we happen to think quite highly of.
