Clickin' it old-school

November 23, 2009 2:30 PM

The newly launched Atari.com includes the Atari Arcade, wherein you may play Adventure, Asteroids, Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Lunar Lander and Yars' Revenge in your browser.
posted by jbickers (37 comments total)

Ooh, Crystal Castles is a good game. Bentley Bear's my man, and an exception to the general rule that my favorite 2600 games are Activision ones.

(2600 fans might also like AtariAge. Emulator fans might like Stella.)
posted by box at 2:39 PM on November 23, 2009

Wow, did you just ever make my hubby happy. We were talking about Yars' Revenge yesterday, and how much he played it. Hes already playing it now.
posted by strixus at 2:40 PM on November 23, 2009

Cool to seem 'em. I remember at the Game Developer's Conference as way back as 2000 they showed a Flash version of Frogger, and talked about how much fun it was to reverse-engineer the Z-80 code to figure out what was going on.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:48 PM on November 23, 2009

well, fuck. there goes thanksgiving.
posted by fingers_of_fire at 2:57 PM on November 23, 2009

Crystal Castles!
posted by GuyZero at 2:58 PM on November 23, 2009

I love Adventure. You are a block chasing duck-like dragons. Now I'm off to Shakeys Pizza for a game of Tempest.
posted by birdherder at 2:59 PM on November 23, 2009 [4 favorites]

well, fuck. there goes thanksgiving.

Yep. Someone else is going to have to cook the turkey this year. I'm now busy for the next week.
posted by foodgeek at 2:59 PM on November 23, 2009

Awesome. There probably weren't too many people wondering why Nintendo didn't release a an Atari games compilation for the Gamecube or Wii (like they did for Midway and Intellivision), but I was one of them.
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:00 PM on November 23, 2009

I'm pretty sure this is an emulator running original ROMs. At least, the goofy Adventure palette flashing is there and the arcade games look and feel exactly right. The web page is Flash; are there good emulators for Flash now? (Here's fMAME, which has no sound).
posted by Nelson at 3:05 PM on November 23, 2009

Oh yes. Yars will have his revenge. Man, I wasted hours on that game, and I have no frickin' clue what the point was supposed to be. Giant flies in space or something?
posted by dortmunder at 3:14 PM on November 23, 2009

[squibbles] Universal is producing an Asteroids Movie!
[~blue_tetris] It sounds absolutely awful.
[~blue_tetris] I'd shoot that movie, if not for the fear that it would break into three smaller movies.

posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 3:23 PM on November 23, 2009 [11 favorites]

[clicks on Asteroids, rubs hand together with glee]

Phew, phew phe-BOOM!

Phew, phew phew, BOOM!

Phew, phew phew, pffft, phew, ph-BOOM!

GAME OVER

[still sucks]
posted by CynicalKnight at 3:36 PM on November 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

birdherder: I love Adventure. You are a block chasing duck-like dragons

Only if you're carrying the sword. If you're not, then you're a block being chased by duck-like dragons.

The Card Cheat: There probably weren't too many people wondering why Nintendo didn't release a an Atari games compilation for the Gamecube or Wii (like they did for Midway and Intellivision), but I was one of them.

For starters, Nintendo only approves the software and licenses it for play on their system. It is up to the individual property rights holders to approve, and maybe even make, the software themselves.

Midway did this for Gamecube/PS2/Xbox with the surprisingly wonderful Midway Arcade Treasures collections, although they did it for earlier systems, with fewer games per package. Unfortunately Midway is pretty much defunct at this stage, but I suppose the rights are still worth something to WMS.

The Intellivision package is fairly strange, as it appears to have been licensed from the developers who originally made the games. INTV Corporation appears to have the rights to the games, and were still making new Intellivision games through to the end of the 80s. The story of the games' long, weird journey is an interesting one. There's an informative e2 node about them.

Atari, or more accurately Infogrammes calling itself Atari (the actual company that made the old games is long gone at this point, Infogrammes just owns the rights to their earlier output) actually produced many collections of the classic games for prior systems, but have probably decided they were glutting the market.
posted by JHarris at 3:43 PM on November 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Man, I still suck at lunar lander.
posted by lumpenprole at 3:47 PM on November 23, 2009

It's really interesting how memory works. I replayed Adventure for the first time in, oh, probably eight or ten years. I ran it at least once on an emulator to see the easter egg, so it's not like it's been the full three decades since the original, but it's still been a long time.

What I remembered going in: three dragons, three castles, three keys, sword to kill dragons, limited-visibility maze in the lower right, and roughly the path to take through that maze to get to the white castle. That was about all.

I was quite fascinated to discover that, while the blue maze was a surprise, I knew exactly where to go. I hesitated one or two seconds when I got there, "wow, what's this?" and then a little light went on, and zoom, off I went. And I also remembered immediately what to do to get through the maze in the black castle, even though the fact that there WAS a maze was news to me. I don't, however, remember the maze in the white castle very well. I fumbled around in there a bit, and I think there's more to it that I didn't get to in my one complete playthrough.

It's weird just how deeply etched those memories are, and how far below consciousness they lurk. I suspect that, were I deep in Alzheimer's, if you sat me down in front of Adventure, I'd play it as smoothly and competently as the eleven-year-old I once was. My fingers know it as much as my brain, and it's really rather marvelous to watch, even though I can't imagine a more useless skill to have.
posted by Malor at 3:51 PM on November 23, 2009 [8 favorites]

Oh yes. Yars will have his revenge. Man, I wasted hours on that game, and I have no frickin' clue what the point was supposed to be. Giant flies in space or something?

Wonder no more! Man, I wish I still had this comic, along with the storybook/record combo that came out around the same time.
posted by Dr-Baa at 3:51 PM on November 23, 2009 [4 favorites]

Wonder no more! Man, I wish I still had this comic, along with the storybook/record combo that came out around the same time.

You rock, Dr-Baa.
posted by dortmunder at 4:12 PM on November 23, 2009

Hmm. Except for Asteroids, I was never a dedicated player of any of these in my youth. Still, the topic got me thinking about the bestest arcade game EVAR, Defender. The Killer List of Videogames site tells me,

This game shares the title of "Highest Grossing Video Game of All Time" along with Pac-Man. To date it has earned more than one billion dollars!

I suspect a small but significant percentage of that was from me. My family walked around in slightly stale clothing in the summer of 1982, as I surreptitiously siphoned off quarters from the laundry money supply.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:46 PM on November 23, 2009

Yaaaaaaay, Yars' Revenge!
posted by adamdschneider at 4:54 PM on November 23, 2009

I loved Crystal Castles coin-op and to my memory, yeah, this is a ROM conversion with some tweaking, mainly the reticule for Bentley Bear’s destination. Lame. I use a trackball and I wish the Flash interface would just take control of my pointer and roll where I'm going.
posted by mistersquid at 4:58 PM on November 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

There probably weren't too many people wondering why Nintendo didn't release a an Atari games compilation for the Gamecube or Wii (like they did for Midway and Intellivision), but I was one of them.

There's a Nintendo DS title, Retro Atari Classics -- sadly, it's absolute garbage and can be found in used GameStop bins from coast to coast. Not recommended unless it's $3.99 or less.
posted by porn in the woods at 5:06 PM on November 23, 2009

Thanks to this post, I spent all my paper route collection money.
posted by mistersquid at 5:41 PM on November 23, 2009

Oh, good, someone else thought YR was cool. All my friends looked at me like I had a tesseract for a face whenever I wanted to play that game.
posted by notsnot at 6:57 PM on November 23, 2009

Well, playing Crystal Castles is pretty tough with the arrow keys. Especially once you get up to level 7, but I put a high score up there for all you guys to shoot at. (tdch)
It'd be nice to have a trackball to throw Bentley all the way across the screen. Some of the tree levels get pretty deadly without that ability.
posted by tehdiplomat at 6:58 PM on November 23, 2009

You rock, Dr-Baa.

Thanks! By the way:

FLY, YAR WARRIORS, FLY!
posted by Dr-Baa at 7:13 PM on November 23, 2009 [2 favorites]

Oh hey, I meant to mark that as a quote.

I don't normally go around complimenting and thanking myself, really.
posted by Dr-Baa at 7:15 PM on November 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

I really suck at Lunar Lander.
posted by PHINC at 9:16 PM on November 23, 2009

Aww, no Berserk. Still a fun game, and the first known video game with a bodycount.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:18 PM on November 23, 2009

So, um, what do you DO in Yar's Revenge, exactly? I cleared out the orange half-sphere and wandered around for a while back and forth through the static with the little glowy missile following me, and then I died for no apparent reason. My shots always went through the glowing nipple/shuriken, no matter where I stood to shoot at it.
posted by Scattercat at 9:32 PM on November 23, 2009

You have to load the Zorlon Canon by eating the celluliod barrier and fire it at the exposed Qotile without killing your Yar!! DUH!!!

Manual here.
posted by pashdown at 10:19 PM on November 23, 2009 [2 favorites]

These run at about triple speed for me, for some reason. My Yar can't avoid the flying swastika :/
posted by Limiter at 5:10 AM on November 24, 2009

The fun is back, oh yes sirree! It's the 2600 from A-tar-i.

I got my copy of Yar's Revenge from a friend in fifth grade. He accidentally cracked the game case open and out popped the ROM. He was worried that it could be Very Dangerous to put a "computer chip like that" into the Atari without having that plastic case around it, because "the electricity is going through it".

He swapped it to me for two mini boxes of Nerds. Along with Jolly Ranchers, the Nerds boxes were our currency in fifth grade, thanks to an enterprising student and his uncle's wholesale connection. I knew I came out ahead in the deal, though it was a while before I worked up the nerve to put the chip in and turn the game on.

Man, them things was bulletproof.
posted by Spatch at 5:28 AM on November 24, 2009

No Joust. *sigh*
posted by pentagoet at 6:27 AM on November 24, 2009

Awesome... Needs Defender and Missile Command.
posted by LakesideOrion at 6:38 AM on November 24, 2009

Both Joust and Defender are Williams games, not Atari. I think those ended up owned by Midway (which oddly also owned some part of Atari properties when they fell apart).
posted by Nelson at 6:56 AM on November 24, 2009

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to see a man named Yar about some revenge."
posted by namewithoutwords at 8:45 AM on November 24, 2009

I love how any movie from the 80's that features an arcade or computer scene uses sound effects from one of two games: Yar's Revenge or (the crappy Atari version of) Pacman.
posted by ericbop at 9:51 AM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]