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Activision Anthology Adds Homebrew Games, Classics Lauded

Posted by simoniker on from the hurrah-for-yesterday dept.

Thanks to GameSpot for their review of Activision Anthology for the GameBoy Advance, as the compilation of Atari 2600 titles such as Pitfall! and River Raid goes portable, following a previously released PlayStation 2 version. The creators of the compilation "recruited Bradford W. Mott, the creator of the personal computer Stella Atari emulator, to write the underlying code" for the anthology, and, as IGN Pocket points out, "there are also several homebrew 2600 games included in this pack", including Skeleton+ and Climber 5. There's a lengthy thread on the compilation over at AtariAge, and elsewhere, Slate has passionate words to impart about classic games and how "restrictions... inspire creativity", and Yahoo/Reuters has similarly nostalgic musings about the recent retro revival.

2 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. It's just so cool by gasaraki · · Score: 4, Insightful

    that 7 year olds of today are still playing games like Pitfall (and hopefully enjoying them). Just goes to show that simple games like these can be just as entertaining as the multi-million-dollar budget extravaganzas we get today. Graphics can only really get you so far.

  2. Re:Emulators becoming a stepping stone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Nintendo probably wouldn't.... whereas the Atari specifications, secret docs, and what have you, have long been scattered, Nintendo has all the old docs on the SNES right there. They've also gone over them recently in order to port games to the Gameboy Advance.

    I'm sure the developer of ZSNES would be the first to acknowledge that what Nintendo knows about the SNES just isn't out there in the emulation community. Moreover, they don't WANT it out there, so hiring outside emulator developers would mean a contract so restrictive that it killed off development on whichever emulator was involved.