It’s hard for many people—me included—to appreciate 1980s games if we weren’t around to play them in their prime. However, my perspective entirely changed after playing an ongoing series of interactive retro gaming documentaries that chronicle that formative era.
1980s Gaming Was Before My Time
By the time I first touched a controller in the mid 1990s, video games were already in full transition to the polygonal realm. Alongside playing games on a hand-me-down Game Boy and SNES, I was regularly floored by the 3D graphics of Nintendo 64s owned by neighborhood kids.
Put otherwise, I was experiencing the likes ofSuper Mario Land,Donkey Kong Country, andSuper Mario 64in the same breath. I didn’t think about games in terms of console generations as much as I did Nintendo being all there was, and there were different Nintendos. If you tried to explain what an Atari 2600 was to me, all I would’ve asked was whatMariogames it had.
In truth, I wouldn’t find out about the wider world of gaming until the next decade. The first thing I knew about Atari were all thecopies ofE.T. the Extra-Terrestrialburied in a landfill, and following that, the janky recreations of classics likePac-Manthat the 2600 was notorious for. While I could easily return to the more advanced sprite-based consoles that I grew up with, the thought of trying those more primitive games was a complete non-starter.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have appreciated them if I had. Even now, they’rehard to appreciate without context. Thankfully, a studio passionate about game history preservation recently corrected my ignorance by providing that context.
I Found the Cure for Retro Gaming Ignorance
Digital Eclipse’s history dates back over three decades, though most people these days know the studio best for its retro game collections. For the longest time, these were hubs for ports with online play added and some art and music stuffed into a “bonus” folder. They were great ways to try outclassic fighting gamesand platformers, but the novelty wore out pretty quickly and lacked much of a lasting impression.
This all changed in 2022 with the release ofAtari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. Digital Eclipse invented an ingenious interactive timeline that placed the game alongside documentary footage, scanned ads, and development materials. Descriptions of each’s importance gave every included game and miscellany context regarding its importance to the overarching journey through the timeline. Suddenly, games that are pretty rough by modern standards were given new life via the museum treatment.
After the acclaim and success ofAtari 50, Digital Eclipse started releasing itsGold Master Seriesthat replicated the timeline format for other collections. Three entries have been released under this umbrella so far, each with its own unique flavor and perspective. I’ve journeyed through all these timelines, and each left a distinctly different impact on me. As a whole, they’ve given me an adoration for the earliest years of video games that I otherwise had no way of tapping into.
The Quintessential Gaming History Lesson
By the time I was born in 1993,the story of Atari as an industry pioneerhad already been written.Atari 50was therefore a peek into the game industry from the start of its existence up until the start of mine. It was everything I had deemed too “before my time” to bother exploring, and the only thing hooking me in was curiosity regarding its documentary format.
Atari 50’sseven timelines cover the gamut of the company’s 1970s and 1980s output, ranging from its genesis making arcade coin-op games to the dominance of the Atari 2600 home console to its ill-fated attempt to enter the Game Boy-dominated handheld market. They paint a picture of a company that built an empire off ofPong, wrote the figurative manual on game design concepts through trial and error, and used this mastery to create the first commercially successful video game console (one so beloved that its two follow-ups couldn’t replace it).
By starting off with the arcade originals that Atari later downscaled for less powerful home hardware, players are shown the most palatable versions to modern audiences from the outset. Alongside these are a handful of reimagined entries developed by Digital Eclipse for this collection, some of which capture the spirit of their source material better than others. After experiencing this, you can start to appreciate what the arcade ports to less powerful hardware aimed to achieve, and how impressively close many often got.
There are so many games here that I could only play each for a few minutes before continuing the story. This turned the Atari catalog into a playable collage of sights and sounds. While any single game may not hold up well, experiencing them one after another in short bursts allowed them to become a series of captivating snapshots that put me in an Atari-induced trance. You could say I vibed with Atari more than I played Atari.
There’s also a certain magic about being told, “This game was revolutionary for this one small detail,” and then loading it up to view it from that lens. Each game becomes a stepping stone toward design trends recognizable even in today’s games. By the time you’re playing more complex games likeTempestandBerzerk, you’re clued into exactly what would’ve made them impressive to gamers of the era.
Walking away fromAtari 50, I had essentially filled in the gap in my pre-1990s gaming knowledge. However, it was the next installment that would capture my heart.
Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
WHERE TO PLAY
A collection of classic Atari games presented on a timeline with documentary footage and archived materials.
A Martial Arts Masterpiece
Going into this four-docugame odyssey,The Making of Karatekawas the entry that interested me the least. It ended up being my favorite.
I’d never heard ofKaratekaprior to this firstGold Master Seriesentry. I’d wager that’s similarly true of others my age or younger, as whileKaratekawas undeniably successful and influential, its legacy now lies in the shadow of developer Jordan Mechner’s spiritual-successor-turned-multimedia-franchisePrince of Persia. That made it a great choice for this revival, especially given the painstaking documentation Mechner kept of his development journey.
This collection may be the most comprehensive portrait of a 1980s game developer that exists. You see everything from Mechner’s earliest playableAsteroidscloneprototypes to the many contentious letters to his publisher, to the videos of his family performing karate moves that he translated intoKarateka’srealistic character animations viarotoscoping. By the time you’re presented an early prototype of the game over halfway through the experience, you’ve developed a reverence for its every fine detail.
Without all this, I’d likely playKaratekafor a few minutes as a historical curio and move along, much like I did with most of theAtari 50games. However, the journey helped me appreciate the brilliance of its simple-but-complex sparring, the impressive cinematic flair that was revelatory for its time, and the leitmotif musical cues that help tell its story. If playing still feels too antiquated, the game can instead play itself, allowing you to still soak in the details pointed out by the documentary materials. (you’re able to also take over control at any time during the computer’s playthrough, an impressive technical achievement on Digital Eclipse’s part.)
The cherry on top is Digital Eclipse’s largely faithful remake of the game that concludesThe Making of Karateka. This updates its animation to be even more fluid and responsive while retaining the iconic key frames, removes frame rate issues, and implements content that was cut from the original. Of all the reimagined games that Digital Eclipse developed for these collections, this is easily the best.
Also, I can’t close out talking aboutThe Making of Karatekawithout lauding its unconventional approach to documentary interviews. Jordan Mechner is never interviewed directly but is instead filmed conversationally interviewing his father, a renaissance man who aided his son in makingKarateka, most notably as its composer. It does wonders of making both Mechners captivating characters and gives reverence to the father, who could’ve easily been an unjust footnote despite his essential role in the game being the masterpiece it is. It also gave me confidence going forward that Digital Eclipse was here to accurately record history, not myth-making.
Gaming’s Hippie Hero
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Storyhas a lot in common withThe Making of Karateka. It’s a story of a scrappy developer scratching out a place for himself during the first video game boom, complete with copious documentation that has been shockingly well-preserved across the decades. It’s also a lot likeAtari 50in the mass of games on offer, even sharing the Minter-developedTempest 2000.
However, what sets apart this secondGold Master Seriesentry—aside from all the psychedelic llamas—is how it reminds us that the true heart of gaming lives in independence, not the corporate AAA industry we’re currently watching crumble in real time.
Jeff Minter’s story is one of a rare outsider trailblazer who has largely circumvented the industry while managing to have a career that continues to thrive today. He was essentially gaming’s first blogger, except his blog entries were trippy experimental games regularly released via mail-order cassettes. He’d later start to send pamphlets to his loyal fans with stream-of-consciousness musings about his life adventures, recently played games, and spats with gaming magazines. You get to play virtually the entire expanse of Minter’s prolific 1980s output here, as well as read those pamphlets and other writings in full if you really want to dig deep.
Minter reveled in the weird, creating a universe of animal characters across his games. Giant mutant llamas and a borderline-satanic-but-decidedly-not bipedal goat creature are only the tip of the iceberg. Watching this iconography evolve between games starts to make a lot of sense in the context of Minter’s reverence for the real creatures. What really caught me off guard were his forays into music visualizers, though. The interactive light show technology he iterated upon alongside traditional game releases was genuinely groundbreaking. He doesn’t get the recognition he deserves for how he helped evolve this technology that remains relevant today, but then again, theGold Master Seriesexists to right these wrongs.
There are also a lot of fun storylines that eagle-eyed viewers will pick up on. My favorite was Minter regularly agonizing over his brokenTempestcabinet in his pamphlets, only to end up developingTempestsequels for years to come. Even if his collaborations with Atari were a noted move towards the industry, it was born out of genuine passion for the projects and never extended beyond that. There are few creatives who get to maintain the autonomy and independence that Minter does, so this tale is truly aspirational.
An Enduring Classic’s Evolution
While the previous twoGold Master Seriesentries put a spotlight on 1980s games that had become obscurities,Tetris Foreveris the polar opposite. It’s instead a celebration of what might be the most-played game ever, even if its 1990s run of sequel attempts have remained relatively obscure. TheTetrisstory is also one people already know, but Digital Eclipse provides just enough nuance and context to keep it compelling.
For example, while Alexey Pajitnov’s four-day development ofTetrisas a bit of personal entertainment might be a piece of trivia fans already know, Digital Eclipse spruced up the experience by recreating that original version lost to time. Henk Rogers’ famous trip to Moscow under a travel visa to get the rights toTetrison behalf of Nintendo is also elevated by the inclusion of the archival footage Rogers filmed while there. There may not be much in the way of new revelations, and the story is unfortunately undercut by the inability to include the seminal Nintendo releases on the Game Boy and NES, but the timeline format makes this the best retelling of theTetrissaga anyway.
It helps that, despite the Nintendo omissions, this is the most expansive collection ofTetrisoddities I’m aware of. Variants likeBomBliss,Hatris, andWelltrismight not have found a cultural footing given the simple but complex perfection of the original, yet it’s still fun to see the different spins Pajitnov and other developers tried to make work. A lot of them were more fun than I could’ve expected, too. The highlight for me had to beTetris Battle Gaiden, a Japan-only anime-fueled competitiveTetrisgame that created the blueprint for many similar modes to come.
Digital Eclipse also put its own spin on the puzzler calledTetris Time Warp. While the concept isn’t as fleshed out as I might’ve liked (every era you “warp” to plays too similarly), it was a clever way to insert the Game Boy aesthetic without stepping on the toes of Nintendo ninjas. It’s fitting given that theTetrisstory is already defined by developers and business people skirting the rules.
The New Trend in Game Collections
By exploring the one era of mainstream video games that I missed out on entirely throughAtari 50and theGold Master Series, I came to better appreciate where my hobby-turned-profession originated from, and to love a few select titles I otherwise would never have played.
I hope that the success of this format will continue not only through Digital Eclipse but also other studios and publishers who want to preserve their history. I’d immediately buy all the Nintendo classics again if they were contextualized within the story of the company’s evolution from toys to games, or splurge on yet another Capcom fighting collection with the same games if they showed how the company grew from one game to the next. Or, since we’re already oversaturated with Capcom collections, maybe this is SNK’s time to shine by chronicling its fighting game franchises.
If you’re looking for the next closest thing to theGold Master Series, your best bet may beUFO 50. Its titular studio might be a complete fabrication, but the collection of 50 games its developers created under that moniker span a similar 1980s timeframe toAtari 50while likely being more palatable to play for modern audiences than the real deal.
I can’t wait to see what piece of gaming history that Digital Eclipse gives the timeline treatment next. Where once I wouldn’t have given 1980s gaming the time of day, now I crave it, assuming the requisite context is provided.
