Atari announced a new game this week called Atari Mania which looks to put a creative twist on some of the retro classics the company is best known for including Pong, Centipede, and many more. It comes with over “150 wild microgames” which isn’t too unusual for retro collections like these, but the catch here is that these games have been mashed up with one another to combine fan-favorites from Atari’s vast catalog of games.
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If that’s not super clear, the trailer below released for the new Atari Mania game and a preview of it shared on the game’s site should paint a better picture of what Atari called “a wild journey through videogame history.”
“Familiar and beloved games begin to warp, mutate and combine into a series of increasingly crazy challenges,” the preview of the game said. “It’s up to you to fight back the pixels and other surprising villains, and restore order to the Vault!”
One of the mashups, for example, will see players fight against centipedes using Pong paddles. Considering there are over 150 games to play in this collection, it sounds as though we’ll see plenty of creative collaborations between games like that one.
“Over 150 wild microgames spanning the breadth of the Atari catalog from Asteroids to Yars’ Revenge,” Atari said. “You’ll fight back Centipedes with a Pong paddle while the iconic Adventure dragon hunts you down!”
All of these microgames are wrapped up in a narrative where players control a character known as the “Caretaker of the Atari Vault.” In the story of Atari Mania, the Caretaker discovers a dead pixel which leads to mayhem throughout the catalog of Atari games. Other features like Easter eggs and a “charming neo-retro art update to the classic Atari 2600 style” exist to give Atari fans more callbacks to look forward to.
So far, the game has only been announced for three platforms: The Atari VCS, the Nintendo Switch and the PC platform via Steam. It’s got a broad release date of sometime in Summer 2022, but a specific date has not yet been set.
