Quick Look: Atari Flashback Classics vol. 1

Oh, to be sure, I'm super glad to have access to the games on here that are worth revisiting, so no regrets... but I do feel a bit gouged.

@melodiousj: Oh for sure, I always loved their arcade stuff and their bigger name games made it to just about every platform over time. Now I think about it, I did have a friend with a 7800, which was a fun (and really cool looking) system. There are a couple of games in this package I recognise from playing the 7800 versions at his house, which is giving me a real nostalgia rush. I just find it hard to watch 2600 games.

But man, even just a couple 9f paragraphs about the history of the game makes a difference to packages like this.

Why don't these things ever have 5200 or 7800 or even like the 8-bit computer versions of games? Sure would beat things like BASIC MATH.

I wonder if that star Raider's game was the for-runner of Star Master, had the same sights. That was a game I played decades ago with my brief brush with video games before PC

Man, this takes me back to the early 80s where I played the hell out of my Philips G7000 (Magnavox Odyssey² for you Americans).

I guess the tricaster wasn't picking up the frames where the shots were being rendered in Yar's Revenge (it happens sometimes with the framerate). That's a shame.

Tempest is displayed wrong. It should be 3:4, not 4:3. Is there an option to play it in its proper vertically-oriented aspect ratio?

Oh look, another "well, we own the rights to all these incredibly lame old games, so let's cash in on retro nostalgia" collection. At least it seems to be marginally better quality than the Game Room versions.

On the twin-stick subject, I don't know what is technically and truly the "first" one (though Robotron is largely remembered as the first), but I think it might have been Vanguard. I'm pretty sure it predated Robotron; it was a space shooter that alternated between vertical and horizontal shooting, but the ship could shoot in four directions while moving in four directions. I haven't played since I was a kid, but I remember thinking it was pretty good.

I saw a guy in the alley eating a corndog this morning and got pretty excited about it.

Jeff "Man of the People" Gerrstmann

@theterriblefamiliar: They get to it eventually. They didn't realise it was arranged vertically instead of horizontally.

Holy crap, Lunar Lander brings back some long-buried memories. Tempest, too. I feel like Atari has an established back-door into the subconscious of gamers of a certain age, it seems like they could leverage it a lot more than they have. These games are so deeply embedded in my formative childhood memories, I bet they could slip some vector-line subliminal messaging into their products and control people's brains Snow Crash style.

Huh. I played the hell out of my 2600, and later, my 7800. That game called Radar Lock looked just like a game I played on my 2600 called Solaris. Solaris has you traveling to different planets, though, and it looks like Radar Lock is not quite on that level.

the game was 27 bucks here. I totally understand that

it should be noted to @jeff and @brad if they didn't already figure it out but the control options are outside the game by pressing options.

you can change to not centre in the middle and it works MUCH better.

Nothing Stops the Eternal Game Room Quick Look; may it rest in pieces.

This bought back a load of Game Room nostalgia, which such classics as 3D Tic Tac Toe. I must confess, I still think Tempest looks amazing today. The graphical style still looks incredible.

As someone who was born years after most of these games were a thing, this era of 2600 stuff feels so disconnected from anything resembling what I know as Video Games at some point.

@arbitrarywater: Almost the opposite for me, I was born almost a decade after Atari was already an old hat. and yet these games are so alluring. The simple mechanics, the sound effects, the case/side art, the lack of music in most cases, the vector graphics, the barely recognizable abstracted sprites, the sensory overload of shifting, rotating patterns, the clashing colors and gradients. It's so bizarre, it can ONLY be identified as the most VIDEO GAME. Obviously, actually playing a lot of these games, even some of the better ones for more than a few minutes can be a chore, but it's enjoyable to just soak in the VIDEO GAMEness of them. That probably sounds like retro hipster bullshit, but whatever. I do genuinely love a good, simple high score based game like Centipede or Missile Command. Robotron is probably in my top 5 games.

QuadRun is my aesthetic.

@huckleberrysassacre: I think what gets me is the level of abstraction present in a lot of the 2600 stuff; the arcade games less so. Stuff like Star Raiders, or those Sword Quest games are trying so hard to achieve a certain level of complexity with nigh-incomprehensible blobby flickering sprites and it sort of blows my mind that anyone got anything out of those games.

I'm not trying to be one of those youngsters who just doesn't "get" the classics, but I feel like I would have a hard time finding something in that catalogue that I'd want to play for more than 20 minutes at most. By contrast, I think I could probably play at least a third of the games on that new little mini-NES thing for hours and not have much of a problem.

I feel like this is the loudest video I've ever heard.

@arbitrarywater: I agree with the obtuseness of more "adventure" games. Like i've watched Jeff play Superman for the 2600 and it seems like nonsense, but obviously remember that these things had manuals to explain that shit.

@arbitrarywater: I agree in the sense that these dont look like games to me. Who knew what games would become when this started.

Maybe I missed it, but no Qix no sale

Nothing stops the Flashback Quick Look!

On the PS4 you can you use the touch pad to simulate the trackball or analog spinner controls. It's way better. You can also turn off the auto centering of paddles in the paddle games.

FWIW, taking the time to learn the nuances of the older 2600 games turns them from impenetrable junk into pretty fun game play.

It's unfortunate they don't mention this (maybe they don't know?) but these are on PC (on steam) and I believe you can get all of them in one collection on steam for $20 while this appears to cut that release in half so you have to pay twice as much.

On steam it's called Atari Vault, but it's the same thing as this.

@jeff just because I think it's interesting and maybe you'd want to know if you do decide to do another of these for "Vol 2"

@dasakamov: wow do I disagree - the controller was great as it allowed much more complicated games. You couldn't get something like utopia on an Atria - and even the current controllers for ps4 were not complicated enough to replicate. Played intellivision lives recently and man were those games still great but couldn't control them really even with the ps4 controller. Games were uninspired...? Seriously? They were computer game levels of complicated and hard. I mean they had an early rouge like RPG for heaven's sake. Sigh... people are truly crazy then and now it seems.

This video is giving me serious warm vibes that I haven't felt since the Game Room days.

The story of SwordQuest is pretty interesting.

Sweet. $20 seems like a great price for 100 games.

The problem with this is most of games I actually liked on the 2600 were made by Activision.

This is like Game Room all over again! just missing those hot intellivision bangers.

Also, Yars' revenge is an amazing example of great game design considering the extreme technical limitations of the system.

"Smash the fucking Qotile!"

Brad was making me laugh with his incredulous response to Combat 2 and the Quadrun voice. By the way, Quadrun was an official - but limited - release. It was initially only available to Atari Club members through the AtariAge magazine, IIRC. I think it had a commercial release, but that would've been after the '83 crash.

Vector games - my hope is that one HDR monitors become commonplace that some enterprising coder will do proper vector emulation. I hadn't played an actual arcade vector game in many years until recently; I was astounded at how bright the bright parts were (e.g. the shots from your ship in Asteroids) versus the lower luminance elements. That is something that has not been properly emulated yet, but hopefully HDR will allow for that to become a possibility.

"I always scratch my head in disbelief when I see stuff NOBODY would ever want to play like Backgammon or Blackjack. Like who would WANT to play the 2800 version of Backgammon?"

Because they're free - they don't require any licensing deals and allows them to boost the number of included games. Atari Chess (which I didn't notice if it was included or not in this collection), was notable because it would literally cheat by making multiple moves at the higher difficulty levels if you waited too long to make a move.

From your mouth to God's ears. But the odds of that happening are slim to none. The Atari name has changed hands so many times, it's just a shell corporation at this point. There's no one tied to the Bushnell, Warner, or Tramiel eras - only bean counters at this point.

The first Atari Flashback retro console had a handful of 7800 games, but that was 10-12 years ago and they were poorly done. Not even emulated, but ported to work on a NES-on-a-chip. They ditched those for a much more faithful recreation of the 2600 with the Flashback 2, and sales were dramatically improved as a result.

"Atari" knows the vast majority of their audience today doesn't even realize the 5200 or 7800 existed. They've been repackaging the same collection of 80 2600 games and a dozen arcade games ever since, both for consoles/PC and their Flashback line of standalone consoles - and people keep buying them.

And not without cause, to be honest. Most of the games Atari published for the 5200 were arcade ports of games they licensed from other publishers: Namco, Williams, Lucasfilm, among others. If you look at the number of games Atari officially released that they still own the rights to, there's *maybe* 12 games, tops. And half of those are the "RealSports" series.

The 7800 catalog fares marginally better, but it's still largely a bunch of others' properties. And what's left is arcade ports. And since perfect emulation of those early arcade titles has been a solved problem for years, they might as well just provide the actual arcade versions at this point.

They have hired consultants who are active on the AtariAge forums - people who truly care about Atari's legacy and would love to include the more obscure content - which is how we've gotten rare prototypes and homebrews like Combat 2, Adventure 2, etc. over the years.

But those in charge of the purse strings refuse to even consider the other consoles/home computers, because the value proposition simply isn't there to do the development work necessary. There's no incentive for them to do anything else. They'll add a random 2600 third-party title title or two one year, add wireless controllers, make it portable. But the games list will probably never change in any significant way, because people keep buying what they're selling. It sucks, but what can you do.

The good news is you can buy a Raspberry Pi 3, a wireless retro styled controller, and a MicroSD card for well under $100. Download RetroPie, and Bob's your uncle.

I'm on an old man, wealth-of-useless-trivia kick... sorry folks :)

The original Star Raiders for the Atari home computer line predated Starmaster by three years.

@stanleypain said:

Space Dungeon was the first, IIRC. Vanguard allowed you to shoot and move independently, but shooting was controlled by four buttons on the arcade game, not a second stick.

My buddy had Superman when it was new, and it was impenetrable even then. Never owned it myself, so it might have been just an issue of not having access to the manual - which was a necessity with games like Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., etc.

While Atari published Qix for their systems, it was licensed from Taito.

I think I could hear/ watch Jeff talk about/ play old video games allllll day.

Wait, Combat has more than just tanks! O_O How did I not know that?! Right, where did I put my DS Atari Classics cart...... OMG it's not even in that collection! Why cruel world?!? Why?!

Is there a reason this needed to be 2 volumes, could they not fit all their Atari games on 1 Blu Ray Disc?

@theterriblefamiliar:

Yep did my head in as well when they could not see Combat - it's right there just before Combat 2!!!!....

...And breathe