As video games become an increasingly digital-first hobby, the people keeping the Atari name alive are going back to their roots, offering new versions of their 1980s classics.
Last week at the Gamescom conference in Germany, Atari Interactive announced a collaboration with Activision to re-release 39 games from the latter company’s early years on physical cartridges, including Pitfall, River Raid and Megamania.
They can be played on the Atari 2600+, a recreation of the original 2600, which launched in 1977. The newer console supports wireless joysticks and can connect to modern TVs through HDMI.
The 2600+ was released in 2023, along with re-releases of classics such as Pac-Man, Galaga and Dig Dug. It can also play original cartridges for the Atari 2600 and 7800 consoles — if you can find them in your parents’ homes and dust them off. The newly released versions are also backward compatible, meaning they can be played on the original consoles, if you still have a working one.
WATCH | Atari x Activision Collection trailer:
“The audience for these games seems to have not stopped consuming these games. So people who have old games in their closet, when these were released, people were buying these to play their old games,” said Mike Mika, studio head at Digital Eclipse, one of Atari’s labels.
Mika says the Activision releases are particularly meaningful because they represent a reunion of sorts more than 40 years in the making. Activision was formed in 1979 by programmers who had worked at Atari but disagreed with the company’s policy of not crediting its developers or awarding them bonuses on bestselling games.
Now owned by Microsoft as part of Activision Blizzard, the studio is one of the video game industry’s largest and is behind franchises such as Call of Duty and Candy Crush Saga.
“Now we’re working with Activision to bring those games that were the beginning of all that back to Atari,” Mika told CBC News.
Atari brand rises from the ashes
The Atari name has had a tumultuous history since its heydey bringing video games into North American homes in the 1980s. The brand passed through multiple publishers and holding companies in the ’90s and 2000s and is now owned by Luxembourg-based Atari SA, formerly the French-based company Infogrames.
In the 2010s, owner Frédéric Chesnais attempted to revive the brand by engaging in “deeply unsavoury businesses” including gambling and blockchain, according to a report by Gamesindustry.biz, as well as proposing a chain of Atari-themed hotels.
In 2021, the company split in two, with American investor Wade Rosen taking over the gaming division, while Chesnais focusing on other ventures, including a new Atari Token cryptocurrency.
Rosen soon took over as CEO and has gradually sold off or phased out many of the company’s non-gaming ventures, instead focusing more on the retro gaming market and bringing the brand closer to its roots.
Atari acquired studios including Vancouver-based Nightdive Studios and Digital Eclipse. It also launched the Atari 2600+ console, along with other hardware such as joysticks, paddle controllers and the Intellivision Sprint, a revival of another ’80s-era competitor to the 2600.
Atari president Ethan Zoubek said the brand’s iconic logo “was slapped on things opportunistically” and “the soul of it was diminished” in the process.
“When we came in five years ago we really, in many ways, burned it down and built it back up.”
Part of rebuilding the brand Mika said, involved earning back the trust of retro Atari fans — some of whom have continued playing and homebrewing games since the ’80s.
That included recruiting people who worked with the company during its heyday, including hiring Hiro Kimura, the artist behind the original Atari 2600 box art of Pac-Man, to compose new art for the game’s 2025 re-release for the 2600+, according to Atari’s VP of strategic operations Matthew Burnett.
Atari 50, a compilation of classic games paired with an extensive documentary developed by Digital Eclipse, released in 2022 to wide critical acclaim.
For the Atari x Activision collection, the studio also recreated fabric patches included with deluxe versions of each game. Activision originally offered these patches as a mail-order bonus for players who sent in photos of their high scores.
A renewed love for physical games and hardware
Atari’s retro releases remain something of a niche in the wider games market, though its focus on recreating the experience of playing old games on cartridges could benefit from renewed interest in physical media.
Some gamers have expressed frustration that the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI game is being released only as a digital download, rather than on disc. Sony has also faced backlash after announcing it will stop producing discs for its PlayStation games beginning in 2028.
Atari’s games, meanwhile, come in the same black plastic cartridges as they once did, along with box art, instruction manuals and, in some editions, the recreated patches.
“My daughter now, who’s 16, is hardcore into vinyl [records],” said Mika. “Physical is more important to the younger generation now, surprisingly to me, and now we’re getting that kind of interest for these kinds of things too in games.”
