Category Archives: Atari Games

Gauntlet Legends, Arcade

Gauntlet Legends is the fifth game in the Gauntlet series and the first to take Gauntlet the full 3D route. It was a joint venture between Atari Games and Midway Games and was initially released into arcades in 1998.

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Maximum Force, Arcade

Maximum Force is the ‘spiritual successor’ to Atari Games‘ hit lightgun shooter, Area 51. It was developed by Mesa Logic (the same company who made Area 51) and features the same style of gameplay and graphics – pre-rendered backgrounds and environments; fixed, on-rails camera movement, and shot-on-video digitised characters. The game was first released into arcades in 1997 and caters for one or two players.

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Area 51, Arcade

Developed by Mesa Logic and distributed into arcades by Atari Games in 1995, Area 51 is a lightgun shooter for one or two players where you play as a member of a military incursion team, called the Strategic Tactical Advanced Alien Response (STAAR), which has been sent in to prevent aliens – known as The Kronn – and alien-created zombies, from taking over the infamous Area 51 military facility.

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10 Best Marble Madness Conversions

Atari Games‘ classic Marble Madness has been converted to pretty much every home system known to man (apart from those that it hasn’t been ported to, but then again: what have the Romans ever given us?), and here’s our list of the best…

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Marble Madness II, Arcade

***CANNED GAME***

Marble Madness II is the unreleased sequel to the classic Marble Madness. It was developed in 1991 by Atari Games and underwent market testing in a variety of locations, but these were deemed a failure so the game was cancelled and never released.

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Hard Drivin’, Arcade

Hard Drivin’ is a 1989 arcade game developed and manufactured by Atari Games. It allows the player to drive a sports car on a track that emphasises speed and stunts, and was one of the first driving games with a fully 3D polygonal environment.

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Gauntlet, Sega Master System

The Sega Master System conversion of Atari‘s classic arcade game Gauntlet is surprisingly good. For starters: it’s got the fastest fire rate of any of the home versions available, and it plays with a high intensity. This does, however, make the game especially challenging because the health of your heroes does tend to go down rather quickly.

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Gauntlet, Atari ST

This 16-bit conversion of the classic arcade game Gauntlet was developed by Atari Games and was first published in October 1987 by Mindscape.

While, graphically, it’s not quite as lush as the original arcade game, it is very close to it and Atari obviously took care with how it looked and played when they translated it to the ST.

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Hydra, Arcade

Hydra is a relatively obscure arcade action game featuring an armed powerboat that is chasing wanted criminals along twisting waterways in order to intercept and recover various stolen artefacts from them.

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Steel Talons, Arcade

Steel Talons is a helicopter action game that uses 3D, polygonal graphics to represent the playing area. It was developed and manufactured by Atari Games in 1991.

This being from the early 1990s: the 3D graphics are quite simple, and Steel Talons does look complicated to play on first inspection, but the gameplay is actually fairly simple.

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