Can a task be both a dream job and a nightmare job at the same time? We think so, and if anything comes close, it has to be putting together an Atari compilation. On one hand, you have an incredibly rich and interesting history to work with, but on the other you’re being judged against past compilation efforts going back decades. Even for Digital Eclipse, the team behind some of the best retro releases in recent years, it has to be a daunting task. Stephen Frost, the producer of Atari 50, admits as much. “We knew going into this project that a lot of the games that we would need/want to include (mainly 2600 titles) had already been released in several past collections,” he tells us. “We also felt that an important goal for this project, given the 50th anniversary of Atari, would be to tell the story of the company and how its games and hardware releases influenced both the arcade and videogame industries, especially for those who did not grow up in that era.”
Such lofty ambitions necessitated a new approach to the concept of a retro-gaming compilation. “Since the dawn of time, retro-game collections have generally followed the same formula: over here is the list of games, and over here is the presented an opportunity to try something radically different: what if the games, videos, historical content and trivia were all in the same place, all presented in context?”
