If you miss the days of 8-bit, joysticks, and tokens, then Steam is here to fix your woes. Welcome to Steam’s Atari Vault, a collection of 100 classic games from the ’70s and ’80s that will make you feel like you’re back in the arcade, minus the arcade boxes. The 100 games in the collection are throwbacks from the original Atari 2600, and include titles like Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Tempest and Warlords. But calling Atari Vault a collection is a bit of a miscategorization, considering its additional features.
Much like an arcade itself, Steam’s latest is more or less a digital gaming venue, with global leaderboards per game, as well as archives that display each title’s original packaging, as well as three-dimensional arcade machines with 360-degree views, which is appealing to enthusiasts as much as to purists or history-bent gamers. As for menu selection, Steam’s vault comes complete with an updated UI, allowing for efficient title browsing with a retro look.
Above all, the gameplay is the highlight of Steam’s latest proffering: like its leaderboards, Atari Vault lets players around the world compete with a multiplayer option, and if you already own a Steam controller, the touch trackpad can be used in place of a trackball.
“Atari Vault grants convenient access to some of the most memorable titles in gaming history, and in delivering these games in their original state, it is introducing a new generation of gamers to some of the very first video games,” said Fred Chesnais, CEO of Atari, in an official statement issued by the company on March 24. “It is our hope that the same excitement people experienced in the arcades and in their homes when these titles were first introduced can now be embraced again, and that newcomers can discover what made these titles so iconic.”
You can purchase Atari Vault on Steam for $16.99, with a special 15 percent discount as an added bonus. There is one pretty obvious downside to it all: the collection is only available for Windows, so if you don’t have a PC, then you’re out of luck.
Check out Steam’s trailer for Atari Vault in the video clip below.
