Atari 50

I've been around since the days the 2600 was an object of desire, got really into Atari in the ST era, bought a Jaguar (cheap once it was dead) and even I have little interest in this compilation. Atari has been so thoroughly documented and interviewed in the past that I've heard all I need to, and the games have been released and rereleased and rerereleased so many times any novelty of revisiting them has long gone.

Once it's on sale for a quid I might pick it up just for the Jag stuff, but it isn't something I'm especially excited about.

I am Mr Atari.
Used to sell Atari 2600s in a previous life for a living , and collect anything and everything Atari i can get.
Its my biggest collection of retro gameing by far , i think i must have almost 600 carts assorted over 2600/7800/5200/jaguar/lynx    plus Atari 1040 and STs discs by the ton.

My main gripe would be that there's just too much crossover with their previous compilation, Atari Vault, which also had a bigger selection of Arcade, 2600 and 5200 games. They've obviously pulled it from sale but it's still in my Steam library.

Sure, there are some 7800, Lynx and Jaguar ones on there now, but they're mostly the rough end of the catalogue. I suppose it can't be helped that Atari have sold on a lot of their biggest franchises over the years just to keep the company afloat, and that they're still not really in a position where they could do deals with third parties to get them on this, alongside maybe some of the games that they never published.

Ah well, at least we've got this to thank for the BigPEmu Jaguar emulation, as it was developed with the compilation in mind but Digital Eclipse had no objections to the author, Rich Whitehouse, releasing it for free. That's a win for everyone even if you don't buy it.

This is nothing to do with Atari 50, but about the wider question asked by the OP, i.e. Atari fandom.

And I have to say, it's a mixed bag. Like so many, the 2600 is an icon of my youth. I didn't have one, my next door neighbour did, and even though we had a C64 at the time (around '83-'84-ish), I couldn't wait to go round and play the games. Extraordinarily, some of the games such as Frostbite and Robotank actually looked better than C64 games of that time (for all the C64's other advantages, it had a colour disadvantage).

Then you have the Atari 8-bit, which I really knew absolutely nothing about in the 80s - no-one I knew had one, with Spectrums and Amstrads being par for the course, joined by STs and Amigas. But I really like the A8 architecture. It's a bit limited in terms of colour use and player missile graphics (at least compared to sprites), but display lists are very powerful and fast scrolling is handed to the novice coder on a plate.

And there we come to the other side of the "mixed bag". The Atari ST is ... a blight on gaming. It's bad enough that it was in itself such a poor gaming machine. It's really the effect it had on the Amiga, with probably about 80% of Amiga games being diabolically crap ports of ST games, taking no advantage of the Amiga's superior custom chips.

Whenever "retrosutra" posts a new video on Youtube, it is with alarming regularity that the Amiga is embarassingly jerky and washed out compared to, say, the Sharp X68000. And it's clear from the ST version that the Amiga version is just a port. I'm not saying that the Amiga could have matched the Sharp X68000 - but it might have got a bit closer were it not for the fact that the ST was the lead platform for ST/Amiga development, with Sharp X68000 development typically being completely unrelated.

None of that, of course, applies to games such as flight sims which used 3D polygonal graphics, where the ST was a match for (if not slightly better than) the Amiga. But flight sims were not my meat and drink as a gamer in the 80s, so that isn't much consolation to me!

It’s okay, I know I’m being a bit unfair on the ST. I’m fanning the flames because I do slightly miss the days of us all telling each other our respective beloved machines were a pile of poo. But I do think (a) the ST was underpowered as a gaming machine (b) there is a drag factor on Amiga gaming. Maybe not to the degree I said, but what about the time period prior to 1989? 1986-1989 was a significant period when the market really expanded quickly and a lot of the games that are remembered today came from this period. By the early 90s these machines were beginning to wind down. The late 80s is the heyday of these machines and every other Amiga game reviewed in Zzap! at that time was slammed for being yet another poor ST port. They were abundant around that time. No doubt they tailed off, but many of the iconic games that made their mark early in the ST/Amiga era were released at a time when the ST was dominant, and I do think sometimes Amiga owners paid the price - quite literally as Amiga owners typically had to pay a fiver more for a game that was practically identical to its inferior ST counterpart.

The games you mention are all rightly celebrated - clearly for all three scrolling is not an issue, which is a major point of difference. Aside from my own personal and possibly irrational gripe about its impact on the Amiga, the ST is a poor machine for gaming. For certain genres the weaknesses don’t matter but many genres were really just not viable on the machine. No doubt a good machine for other productivity and multimedia tasks, so it was successful for a reason. But … a terrible gaming machine and a poor 16-bit follow up to the A8. The obvious point being that the real successor to the A8 is, of course, the Amiga, and the ST was of course designed as a cost-effective 16-bit machine and no-one can deny that it was successful in that.

It’s interesting that you say the Amiga was difficult to program for. Isn’t it all relative though? With its additional hardware it must have been easier than coding for the ST, right? I totally take the point that the Megadrive would likely have offered the programmer much more. What do you know about the Sharp X68000? Is it even comparable at all, CPU aside? The games do look so much better in the handful of comparisons I’ve seen. I should really learn a bit more about the platform.

It’s a bit much to imply that I’m bitter about it - I just think it’s regrettable that so much software came out that didn’t use the machine to the best of its abilities. Much the same can be said about the Amstrad. The argument you make about commercial expediency is true, but I’m sure that you would have had a better experience had developers made the most of its capabilities. The reasons why are perfectly understandable, but the irrefutable fact is that there is a vast range of poor quality ports for the machine and its potential was frequently not realised.