Atari Vault can simply be described as an emulator that contains a total of 100 Atari games, 18 from their old arcade cabinets and 82 that belong to their home console, the Atari 2600. You can count on finding some of the greatest Atari classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Lunar Lander, Pong, Secret Quest, Sprint and Warlords.
There are quite a few good emulators out there where you can emulate some of these Atari classics, but none of them will give you the chance to have a full 360 3D-rendered version of both the arcade cabinet nor the original game box from the Atari 2600 games that even include the game’s manuals, which can be quite important since most of the Atari games rely on your imagination to figure out what to do. Back in the day there weren’t tutorials like there are today and those manuals can give you a little help to understand exactly what you have to do, and one series in particular, Sword Quest, even has the original comic book that was released with the game. This is one of the features that stood out right from the beginning and gives you the chance to know what the original arcades and game boxes looked like back in the old days.
As for the games, all of them are quite simple yet fun to play, even in current days. There are a few classic games missing, like Pac-Man, E.T. – The Extraterrestrial and Battlezone, among others because Atari doesn’t own their copyrights, but nonetheless the collection in the Atari Vault is quite satisfying. All of the games present are well emulated, the arcade ones presented in the cabinet window and the console ones shown in a cropped window. As far as this review is concerned, explaining each game or even some of the games that are included in Atari Vault isn’t exactly necessary. They all are pretty simple to understand and you get used to what needs to be done in order to play them, as long as you check the controls for each of them since most of them vary from game to game.
All the games in Atari Vault can be either played using the keyboard or a controller. There are also a few of them that offer you the chance to play with the mouse. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to use an original Atari 2600 joystick since the emulator wouldn’t recognize it correctly and all the controls would end up all messed up and unrecognized. Either way, I would recommend using any other controller, Xbox or PlayStation, including the Steam Controller which is fully recognized by the game.
Back in the day when the Atari games present in this emulator were some of the biggest games out in the market, there was a feature which as become almost essential to every game nowadays, the online multiplayer. When almost all of these games were launched, online multiplayer hadn’t been invented yet. The best way to keep gaming competitive back then was more related to the arcade machines and the battling for the top of the leaderboards, which is present in all the arcade games in Atari Vault. Since multiplayer wasn’t exactly a “thing” in the golden days of Atari, it was interesting to see the possibility to play the games of Atari Vault using a multiplayer feature. The concept is quite simple, you either enter a session of a game hosted by anyone or you can host your own session of the game you like and either wait for someone to join you or invite your Steam friends to play with you. When you are hosting a game and waiting for someone to join you, you can pass your time playing another game, and once someone enters your session, you will be automatically transferred to the other session. Once you finish it and quit, you will be brought back to the game that you were playing before.
Summary
Atari Vault is definitely a good investment that I’m sure will please many including older gamers that want to feel the nostalgia of playing some of these classic games that defined a generation back in the day. For me those are the arcade games. Younger players also get to see what modern games have evolved from, since Atari is one of the oldest companies related to video games. It’s certain that not all the games included in this bundle are worth playing, for example, the RealSports franchise, but even so there are a lot of them that are worth playing and will provide some fun.
João is a games journalist, Senior Editor at XDA Developers. They contributed 156 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: previously reported for Neowin before joining XDA Developers in 2021, where he leads coverage of Windows, Microsoft, and hardware.