Ah, Atari. A company often credited as being the progenitor of the entire video gaming industry, but one which bowed out with such a whimper it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In the 1970s and 80s, Atari could literally fire diamonds from a cannon into a lake for 24 hours a day and it still wouldn't make a dent in the petty cash box lying under the receptionist's desk. By the late 1990s though, those halcyon days of wanton abandon were over. Many people point the finger at Atari's final console, the Jaguar for the fine mess the firm ended up in, but in retrospect a combination of poor management and a failure to capitalise on a rich back catalogue is really what sounded the death knell for Atari.
Before you jump down my throat though, know this: I am a
massive fan of the Jaguar and have been collecting games, hardware and memorabilia related to that dumpster fire of a system for quite a while...so I consider myself well positioned to pour humorous scorn. Oh, and Super Burnout is one of my all time favourite racing games, so chill. This article isn't about that criminally-untapped pile of 64-bit awesome though. It's about the Dreamcast and a rather nice compilation of Atari arcade classics of yesteryear that I recently acquired: Atari Anniversary Edition.
