Atari has released an app for the iPad and iPhone that includes 100 games. That got my attention. I loved Atari back in the day, my life revolved around it for a couple years of my life. I got one for Christmas one year and it made my year. I had lots of friends with the system and we would go from house to house playing various ones.
Even then, we knew that the vast majority of Atari games sucked. Their version of Space Invaders had pretty good game play, and there were a handful of other Atari games that were OK. Most of the really good ones were made by other companies like Activision and Imagic. My favorite games that we owned were Warlords and Yar’s Revenge both by Atari, Boxing and Pitfall both by Activision, Riddle of the Sphinx and Trick Shot both by Imagic. The reason we knew that most of Atari’s games sucked was because we also went to the Arcade.
That is where the real magic was. They were dark, had lots of sounds, loud music, and flashing lights. Magic. Atari did well early on in the arcade. Games like Asteroids, Battlezone, Tempest, and Centipede were really popular. As time went on, other companies took the lead in both arcade and console gaming and by 1984 Atari was essentially dead. What a rise and flameout…
I bought the iPad app of course. The ability to have all of these games for $15 was just too good to pass up. The stars are the arcade games. Check these out…
Tempest has a really good control system on the iPad. I was a little leery because of the absence of the original wheel, but the virtual scroll wheel on the left does a great job.
Space Duel was an Asteroids-type of game although I’m not sure which came first. I’m partial to Space Duel because of the cool linked ships. It always led to craziness when you played with two people… At first, I thought the control wheel on the left was a bit of a pain in ass to use but then I remembered the original controls were a pain as well.
SO the games are great of course, but Atari also packaged some great promotional materials with each game as well. Check out this sweet tabletop version of Asteroids!
All in all, an amazing app for $15. If you’re as nostolgic as I am for those early arcade days, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. I hope Activision releases all of their old Atari games and all the old console makers do the same…