IP Detected in Pocket: Atari buys out Stern arcade library

No topic too insignificant for Talking Time, eh?

Anyway, Atari now controls the rights to a dozen Stern games, two of which gamers know very well (Berzerk and Frenzy) and the other ten they likely don't know at all. It's interesting to me as an older gamer, but beyond that, it gives me an excuse to show off this rather... fascinating interpretation of Berzerk by Milton Bradley's Canadian division.




...is the middle robot Evil Otto? Because that took some... uh, imagination. He looks like he should be riding a mechanical bull.

I hope the games will survive under Atari's leadership.
This makes me wonder if Atari should have tried to get the rights to other games earlier, and if it would have even helped them.

I guess what I mean is that the Atari 2600 is known for what? ET (har har), Pac-Man (tee hee hee), River Raid, and Pitfall, right? But those were made by other companies, so when you buy one of Atari's 5 million collections or mini consoles you get things like Checkers and Asteroids on worse hardware.
But then again, I was born a little too late for the 2600, maybe people buy these collections for Canyon Bomber and love every minute of it.

It's weird. I think they released a few Atari Flashback products where the game in question wasn't actually Atari 2600 Pac-Man, but rather a rewritten port for Android hardware, or a rewritten port for the Atari 2600 hardware. Many attempts have been made in the years since to make a version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 that's actually worth playing... sometimes they're hacks of the more successful Ms. Pac-Man, sometimes they're completely new, and sometimes, they're even purposefully restricted to 4K of ROM to illustrate that this was how the game COULD have been in 1981.

And then there was someone who made a little television set that plays several Atari 2600 games, including a simulated version of its crappy Pac-Man port. Which wasn't the same thing as the actual game, but was made to look and feel like it.

ArugulaZ said:

No topic too insignificant for Talking Time, eh?

Anyway, Atari now controls the rights to a dozen Stern games, two of which gamers know very well (Berzerk and Frenzy) and the other ten they likely don't know at all. It's interesting to me as an older gamer, but beyond that, it gives me an excuse to show off this rather... fascinating interpretation of Berzerk by Milton Bradley's Canadian division.

...is the middle robot Evil Otto? Because that took some... uh, imagination. He looks like he should be riding a mechanical bull.

Click to expand...

I loved to collect the board game adaptations when i was a kid. We didn't have a home console until late into the NES era. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were fun. I don't think I ever really understood the Zaxxon game, but I loved the 3D elements. Turbo was great stuff. Out of all of them, I wish I still had that one.
Never did get Berzerk, not for lack of desire...