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Let's hope that, among those "re-imagined" clasics, they are able to port the games on the "Atari Arcade" to the browser of that machine.

I played those games back in the day while I was still using Windows (on MacOS since 2009) and those were good fun.

You can try them (with variable sucess, depending on browser) even now:

https://atari.com/arcade#!/arc...

That pic is amazing. And I still get my ass kicked by Lunar Lander at anything but the easiest settings.

Hmm, kind of reminds me of this:

http://www.atari.com/pongdeveloperchallenge

I read through the rules. It's nothing short of slave labor. They pay for only a few submissions and according to the rules every submission whether it wins or not is completely owned by Atari with all rights and copyrights included.

Oh and the "prizes" for the winners are only actually potential prizes. The actual amount paid is based on a percentage of the revenue from the game with the "prize" as the maximum.

What a f| |cking scam.

I started submitting an idea for this in line with a game I am presently working on. At a glance, they seem to share profit and everything is ok, but read the rules. This is what you give up with your entry: All Entries become the sole and exclusive property of Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned. Sponsor shall own all right, title and interest in and to each Entry, including without limitation all results and proceeds thereof and all elements or constituent parts of Entry (including without limitation the Mobile App, the Design Documents, the Video Trailer, the Playable and all illustrations, logos, mechanicals, renderings, characters, graphics, designs, layouts or other material therein) and all copyrights and renewals and extensions of copyrights therein and thereto. http://files.atari.com/pongContest/Indie_Pong_Developer_Challenge_Rules.pdf I bet this company has no clue how to reinvent PONG or how to successfully reach the mobile market. Under $50,000 in cash is not worth a real developer's time an intellectual property and that's just the winner. They own every entry, so without getting a dime, they own full rights to every idea in your submission. This type of exploitation of talent in the form of a gimmicky competition makes me sick. I can't believe I let myself get excited about it at first. Don't let the same thing happen to you.

When I tried to play Asteroids, it took me to my facebook page and asked for permission... I said no.

Didn't get that Facebook prompt. Were you going for Asteroids under Arcade Classics instead of Asteroids Online found on Featured?

Why bother?

Looks like they are trying to resurrect the brand using flash and possibly other distribution channels.. See HERE for an example. When I tried to play Asteroids, it took me to my facebook page and asked for permission... I said no.

You're right.

It wasn't so hard?

You're right. The article does NOT say it is Alone in the Dark Part 5 or AITD: Near Death Investigation. (If you think it does, then show it to me.)

Again, for slower people - 5 is informal, NDI is full title (PS3 has another). Atari uses simple "Alone in the Dark". You can check it here: http://www.atari.com/games/alone_in_the_dark/pc-download

It simply says "Alone in the Dark" and the ONLY game that ever received that title, without numbers or subtitles, is the original.

"You can click on a link and see a cover - no 5 there" - no additional title also. Also, Atari's game official website. So, sadly, there is a second game under this tile. Of course you can try lie with straight face about it. It doesn't matter. And yes, you are seriously retarded.

For those too young or too old to remember, there is an almost authentic Flash version of the game available over at Atari. http://www.atari.com/arcade/arcade.php?game=asteroids

All my favorite Atari games started with a "P".

I spent countless hours jumping over alligators. http://www.atari.com/us/images/games/FBK2/manual/pitfall.htm

be forgiven for thinking it's a convenient excuse for Atari to attack negative reviews of the only game they're releasing in 2008 that has any chance of making them some money

This one looks quite nice too.

As another crusty old high-school-turned-grown-up, I heartily recommend you try "D&D Tactics" for the PSP if you're looking for the real "tabletop RPG on the computer". It's much more legalistic than WoW - more precisely, its complexity is transparent. The systems takes on the role of DM, and the game plays just like a well written tabletop campaign. A key advantage of the game is that it takes care of all rules, roles, and effects, so you can focus on play - because of this, you can control an entire party in turn-based combat. Much like its inspiration, there are nearly limitless variations - races, classes, weapons, spells, items, and more are turned like a firehose onto the player almost immediately. The one thing this entire paradigm loses, of course, is social interaction. Thankfully, the PSP's ad hoc WiFi allows multiple players to game together on separate PSPs.

Like you, I was yearning for a walk down D&D memory lane. For the past two years, I've been buying up a full set of AD&D 2nd Ed. books from the worldwide garage sale that is eBay. (Let's face it, 2nd Ed. AD&D is the only real D&D... Gygax rules!) I've been trying to get friends on-board but everyone else is more interested in WoW and other MMORPGs. This game was a great way for me to get the D&D fix I was jonesing for.

I just have to mention NWN and NWN2, since I didn't see the article doing that. People are modelling objects and monsters, making single and multiplayer modules (adventures basically), making new GUIS as well as backend tools, running persistent worlds. What I like the most about the Persistent Worlds stuff is that some game masters are running worlds that actually change depending on player actions. Some unique monsters don't respawn, or if en enemy fortress is destroyed for instance, the entry point is removed from the main map until the area is replaced with a newly modelled "destroyed fortress". A few GMs jumps around and control scripts and non-player characters to create a more living world.

MOST are just running simple hack and slash modules of course, infinitely respawning Diablo/WoW clones basically. But it shows what can be accomplished with some skilled and dedicated GMs.

the nielson statistic also suggest that twice as many households have game consoles then have been sold

i think the opposite might be true... at my house there are 3 adults (me, my wife, and my brother) and two children (i have two daughters ages 11 and 6). the living room has an xbox, a ps2, a gamecube, and an atari flashback and the girls' room has a ps1, a vSmile a GBA and a DS. there are also 6 pc's, countless romz, and a drawer full of those battery powered retro gaming appliances that you plug directly into a TV. not counting the PCs, i would wager the "consoles" outnumber the humans in the house by almost 2 to 1. PCs used to outnumber humans until i discovered VMWare.

the adults in the house are currently addicted to the LOTR online beta, but once that subsides and the supply lines become more reliable, we may acquire a wii and/or a 360. if the family were to upgrade to next generation platforms, the console to human ratio may skew to 3 to 1 thanks to backwards incompatibility issues.

Nazis win and the Holocaust never occured
Axis and Allies.

Holy crap! That has to be the longest article I've ever seen on Slashdot that didn't contain a single link.

As a 45-year-old who grew up with games from Pong through the 2600, Atari 800, etc., I'll second this. I used to wish that games (especially simulations, like flight) would get more realistic. But it definitely seems like "realism" has supplanted gameplay these days in the eyes of the game makers. There are few easy-to-pick-up, hard-to-master games out there. And at $45 USD a pop, it's kind of expensive to experiment. This is why I'm going back to my roots this holiday season...I just picked up an Atari Flashback 2 (http://www.atari.com/us/games/atari_flashback2/78 00) console for my 7-year-old daugther and I to play on. The games are a snap to pick up, and much more enjoyable because I can play head-to-head against someone else. 40+ games for 20 bucks. 50 cents a game...heck, not even the vintage arcade games can match that.

Python for Scripting (Or Ruby; Or Lua)

I worked as the lead programmer on a game that used Python for scripting, at a company where another team was also using Python for scripting. From a bugcount and quality-assurance perspective, Python worked out very badly for both games.

The dynamic nature of the language bit us in the ass over and over and over. Suppose early in the game, based on what someone does, there's a script that states:

globalFlags.killedRedDragon = true;

On a quest much later in the game, there's a script that goes something like (loosely paraphrasing Python syntax):

if (player.characterClass == paladin):
        if (NPC.BobTheBlacksmith.GetDisposition() == friendly):
                if (globalFlags. killedRedDagron ):
                        # do some special thing where Bob offers to make
                        # you a special paladin-only helmet from the
                        # bones of the red dragon

You'll note there's a syntax error on that third line. It happens, and it happens especially often with scripters, who are generally among the least experienced coders at a company. You have to build that expectation into your entire development process, and languages with the dynamic flexibility of Python just don't do that.

The problem is that we won't know about the error until that line is actually executed during gameplay. If the scripter himself is doing it, that's going to take several hours. If not, depending on QA, that might not happen for several months. Or if the hourly grunt whose task was to play through the game as a paladin who likes blacksmiths decided to blow off killing the dragon even though it was in his test script, it might not happen at all and you ship with a few hundred outstanding bugs.

Sure, better processes and better people could have used Python to great success. But given limited time for processes and limited budgets for recruiting talent, we would have done much better with something that A) doesn't give people enough flexibility to get most things wrong, and B) gives the team the opportunity to catch what's wrong much earlier in the cycle.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is developed by Obsidian Entertainment. The web site is out of date in terms of screenshots, but here you go:

        http://www.atari.com/nwn2/.

Also check out the Obsidian site:

        http://www.obsidianent.com/

I've been closely following Obsidian Entertainment's development of NWN2 and so far I'm quite happy with their approach. They've completely redone the graphics and toolset, kept the part of the game that worked (rules engine and scripting system), and are focusing on a single player game that so far sounds quite good.

In the last few days, they've released new screenshots (and here), as well as new movies. So far, it looks to be a very pretty game at least.

You may not like it. You may not think it's good art,
but Indigo Prophecy is art.

What's ironic is that Sony is discontinuing the PSOne not long after Atari started reviving the Atari 2600 & 7800 (http://www.atari.com/us/games/atari_flashback/780 0).

Australia is seriously f@$%#, we banned "Getting Up" down here, because it might inspire people to violate the law( ?!?!??!??!). In other words, if you play a game, you will run out, and try out everything in the real world, that you just experienced in cyerspace...right, if that were true, geeks would be number one in getting layed...

Regarding the note [Australian Labour Party == US Democrats], is as true as [US Democrats == US Republicans], as [Australian Labour Party == Australian Liberal Party]...just thought I should point out this lack of choice the so called "anglo-saxan" democracies offer.

"THIS IS NOT FUCKING CHINA!"
Not YET mate, not yet, but we're getting there.

Sounds pretty similar to Dragonshard.

I was being sarcastic... but I am glad in that I succeeded in making you wonder.
Although if I had unlimited funds I would totally seek out and purchase a Pippin, just to have it in a "what the hell were they thinking" section of my console collection (along with Nintendo's Virtual Boy of course).
I'm not being sarcastic when I say that this excites me more than an Xbox 360 for holiday gaming goodness.
(getting pretty of sick of the 360 hype - who knows maybe I'll own one someday, just don't care about this launch)

Or if you're feeling particularly adventurous, try Fahrenheit instead.

...

Yeah, it's the same game, just not trimmed for American prudes. :-]

Check out this game if you get the chance. It should be out for PS2, Xbox and PC now. It does a good job of pulling you in with the story and I actually cared about what happened to the characters. It isn't the hardest game in the world and it's different than most games (think Shenmue style) but fun enough. I think it's getting an average review of about 8.5

http://www.atari.com/indigo/

No pirate applications? Darn, I was really hoping...

Forgive the horrible humor.

We are talking about this new generation. Whats Atari's vision of this, a 20 game no cartridge retro console. Yeah its breaking ground left and right.

Maybe they are planning a wifi/HardDrive/DVD HDTV accessory peripheral. Just going to pick up thier newest console is a trip back in time to 1982.
http://www.atari.com/us/games/atari_flashback/7800

At least they dropped the price from $80 last christmas to 30 now. 10 for console buck a game, almost worth it. Why not fill it up with the whole library? First Partyu only at least.

I have always wanted more people to buy Sid Meiers Pirates! http://www.atari.com/pirates/pirates/index.php That's the only Software Piracy I know of. Or, did they mean copyright violators?

It's about time that they outlawed Deer Hunter. That game ruined my life! Now I'll have time to watch "The Dukes Of Hazard" DVDs.

Yes. I've been practicing for weeks.

Driv3r only has a native Windows version, for one thing ;)

It looks like these companies would do a lot better advertising on things like "Blade Runner", like Atari and TDK did. This did wonders for them.

Ironically, the Atari advertisements you see in Blade Runner are no longer ironic.

Linux might be fine if you like the top of the top First Person Shooters (and occassionally a port of something popular over a year later), but what if you like something less than mainstream?

For instance while all of my friends were getting absorbed in Half-Life 2 or World of Warcraft I was left out because everytime I went to the store to pick up a copy of WoW (and to a lesser degree, HL2) the stores were out of stock.

While looking for something to play I managed to stumble upon a gem that caught me totally off guard.

I noticed Pirates! on the shelf. After reaading the back I realized it was a remake of the old C64, Mac, Amiga, and PC title and I had to buy it, even though I hadn't heard that they were remaking it.

I can honestly say it was not a waste! The game captures so much of the feel of the original while still being made modern. They haven't overlaiden it with stupid features, nor have they made it full of some lame linear storyline.

A good game, and certainly not one I'd expect to find ported to Linux, or even Mac. I just can't see it being popular enough with most people to justify it. Still, games like this are the reason I play PC games at all. As for the top first person shooters, blah. Sure I play them sometimes, but it would take more than that to get me to ditch my Windows box as my primary gaming machine.

The National Rifle Association's online store already carries X-Treme Accuracy Shooting, a sniper training game. "If you like guns, you will love this game." For sex and gun freaks, they have Kill It and Grill It, with a cover showing women in sexy tops carrying big guns. For those who like to shoot while drinking, or drink while shooting, there's the NRA hip flask. So the NRA's already pushing violence, sex, and booze. They make GTA look like small-timers.

And, of course, one of the best selling games of all time continues to be Deer Hunter, now with "ultra realistic environments", "accurate animal behavior" and "addictive gameplay".

So if you're in the game industry and getting flak from "family" groups, give them a tour of the gun nut world and see what they have to say about that.

Pirates , the classic Sid Mier game launches today as well. It's a remake of the classic game.

Yet another place on the internet where people can scream "WALLHACK!" and "AIMBOT!"

On the serious side, though: Claiming that this is for the hunters with disabilities is a pity excuse. Why not just play games like Deer Hunter or Wall Hanger?

This is just another excuse not to go outside and get some fresh air.

Counterfit or not, it was a great idea! A nintendo the size of a controller that had all those old games loaded on it. Good product, its really too bad that the legitimate companies like nintendo didn't come up with the idea themselves.

The problem is not that they couldn't come up with the idea themselves. The problem, and the one that makes it pointless for them to come up with the idea, is the price. The Atari Flashback costs forty or fifty bucks and it's from the days when a pixel element could be measured with sufficient accuracy using a ruler. Some of these pirated Nintendo systems have over a hundred games in them, by these standards they'd cost hundreds of dollars. These companies have inflated ideas of what their old IP is worth.

It is very interesting, however, because it lets you know what hardware is actually worth. In order for a complete system with a hundred games, a light gun, and a second controller to be worth selling for ten bucks, it can't possibly cost more than five dollars to make, and good business practice dictates that you should be making goods for one tenth of their eventual retail price. I doubt they have that much margin on these, they tend to be sold with very few steps in between manufacturer and retailer, which is why you so commonly find them at flea markets. Personally, I'm going on a mission to buy as many of these things as possible before they get cracked down on.

Even low-budget games have staffs of at least 20 people and usually many more.

Well I guess that statement is true in about 99%, one excellent exception to it is Chris Sawyer's Locomotion, which is a brand new game and was made by juste one person (well to be honest I recall that Chris mentioned that for the first time he contracted some of the graphic work to an artist, but still that's at most a 2 man team).
Now granted it's distributed by a large publisher, and they might have done some Q&A on it but that is exptected from any big publisher today.

So back to the point, yes it's still is possible to have one man made games come out on the market and still sell a fair a nice amount of copies. Not to mention beeing great fun to play.

Murphy(c)

I would have to agree. Never have I been anticipating this many good games...

Some games I plan on buying for sure:

GTA: San Andreas
Half-Life 2
World of Warcraft
Sid Meier's Pirates (Remake of the classic pirates!)

Because i just clicked on Show All (after visiting Atari's page linked in the article), and Civilization IV is no longer in the list. Perhaps someone noticed, and retracted the listings.

The internet, it is fleeting...

Because i just clicked on Show All (after visiting Atari's page linked in the article), and Civilization IV is no longer in the list. Perhaps someone noticed, and retracted the listings.

The internet, it is fleeting...

Hey -- 1st off I'd like to say I keep responding because you make very good and intellegent points.

With that out of they way, let the debate continue ;)

Yeah, right. You haven't worked in the software development organization of a Fortune 500 company, have you?

-- This point I'll concede, I've been solely an independent contractor for 12 years, Atari (in '93, when everyone already thought they were dead) being one of them. What they did with the property I created was never divulged, nor was it any of my business. So yeah, I've never seen the internals other than what they wanted me to see.

Funny though how after Atari got divied up between both Midway and Infogrames (the latter which also took the name as theirs and is now ATARI proper) there is all of a sudden the emergence of most if not all classic Atari Games in the works as a port to PS2/3 and Xbox. This all within a year and a half of the acquisition of the IP rights to ATARI, who had significant legacy code pior to it's final breath being acquired. And a complete port no less, all to debut quit shortly. And this conversion done by people who had no knowledge of said IP on the internal systems.

So I now end my digression and cut to the chase -- Apple should not have a tremendous effort in locating an asset of their own making and one that was dicontinued only a few years ago.
Sure, it might take hours to acquire from archives, but it's far from lost.

There's knowing what licenses you have, and then there's knowing what code uses them. These are not the same thing, not by a long shot. Making sure that the newton code was scrubbed of any potential patent liabilities before release could easily eat up two or three man-years of engineering time

Isn't this what paralegals are for? And isn't that what we have project and product managers for? If not, why employ a small army of them? If you only maintain a library of licenses/contracts/agreements with out crossrefrences and a database of notation as to what exactly they were good for, then what exactly have you been paying people to do? I have P.A.'s and the like that come through and take great pride in organizing my documents/contracts/notes and other items into neat and concise volumes with supurb organization. Additionally, these people are not what I would consider "professional" as I am rather cheap ;). So if I can get clear, sensical volumes and crossreferencing performed on the cheap, then why can't a work group at Apple offer signifactly better? If I had a library of IP and Industry agreements and no one could say what it was for, or meant or related to, heads would be rolling out the door in 5 seconds flat. That would be entirely derelict of ones professional duties.

Point is, if you conceed to licensing, you automatically make note of where that license was implemented, no company licenses without reason or intent to utilize said patent without knowing full well where that IP get's put to use and how it was put to use. Something as revolutionary as the Newton, which was the first PDA to market should have quite a library of it's own on who put in what from where, if only because Apple needed to cover it's ass.

Let me go way out on a limb here, and guess... Anyone who might actually *use* it?

As I said, put it out under the GPL with a clear and concise statement that it is for the intent to allow for the code to exist under the OSS community but without any gaurantee of fitness.

Those concerned with current development would be those who have been involved with the Newton for a number of years.
And of course Apple could just play it safe and distribute the last source tree that went "gold" -- not that that ensures validity, but is a safer bet than releasing source from the last known state of revision.

And beside, have you ever looked at the Quake 3 source?
I downloaded

Has Atari heard of Unreal Tournament 2004? Gosh, I hope they have! They published it! It's front-and-center on their site, and listed as the "Hottest Game"!

Or did you mean someone else?

http://www.atari.com/us/games/atari_flashback/7800 Not bad, but I don't really dig the game selection.

The Anthology has 18 arcade games and 62 Atari 2600 games. And the mini-console is going to be a mixture of 2600 and 7800 games.

The Anthology has 18 arcade games and 62 Atari 2600 games. And the mini-console is going to be a mixture of 2600 and 7800 games.

See here for more details of the Atari Flashback Classic Game Console.

The game Driv3r, available on PS/2 and X-box has 3 cities:
- Miami
- Nice (France), and villages around
- Istanbul (Turkey)

The cities are quite well rendered. I know Nice so I can talk, but I can't compare Vice CIty in GTA and Miami in Driv3r as I've never been to Miami.

The game is not as fun as GTA, in particular free driving (out of missions), because it is separated from the scripted game (missions) , the number of secrets is just of 10 per city, and side missions are not interesting.
But the main game (missions in a scenario) is very entertaining and of progressive difficulty.

--
GTA Road-killers Rendez-vous

We would all have better games if we acted like intelligent consumers.

You have seriously failed to prove this statement.

Exhibit A
Exhibit B