The Atari Flashback Classics packs (each having 50 games) are coming to consoles this week. These (50 games per pack) are mostly 2600 games with a few arcade titles thrown in.

I played very little Atari back when it was relevant (By the time I was old enough to game the NES was the hot toy, and I got one very early) but I have messed around with Atari games since then, most extensively with Activision Anthology for the PS2, which I probably played 25 hours of. The games are almost all simple, but their simplicity is an asset today where they can be picked up and messed around with for 5 or 10 minutes at a time.

The lists of games on these collections aren't the greatest, with a lot of stuff that nobody would ever want to play in 2016 like Hangman, Casino, Checkers, Chess and Golf mixed in with other games that are still at least mildly entertaining like Demons to Diamonds, Crystal Castles (arcade and home), Super Breakout (arcade and home) and Tempest (arcade and home).

In addition for some reason the $20 Atari Vault pack for Steam seems to have been broken up into two $20 packs for Xbox One and PS4, which is...Extreme BS.

I'll probably pick these packs up mostly because I want to support more emulated retro releases and I do enjoy playing the occasional hot banger from the Atari days. I am wondering whether anyone else has any interest in this kind of thing though. If Atari games seem primitive to me I can't imagine what they seem like to a teenager or a young twenty-something who grew up with PS2 or later. I guess the equivalent of silent films or Andrews Sisters records.

The Atari 2600 is not an era of gaming I would particularly want to revisit. Maybe fun to own a few of these for noveltys sake, but nothing I actively would want to play.

Is this maybe what the crew is playing on the October 5th livestream? The set background is Pong.

Have you played Frostbite by Activision? It's still pretty good. There's some other stuff that still plays reasonably (what up Enduro?), but yes, on the whole there's just not quite enough there to make most of those games still fun. Metaljesusrocks did a video on 2600 games that don't suck and some of those are in this collection, but he's of an age where he actually played them while they were relevant, and even some of those games don't translate well to modern consoles (for examples Warlords is still cool but not with a modern controller.)

That being said I like old games more than most people (I've played a lot of Gradius and City Connection on the PS4 for example) so for others these packages are probably even less attractive, which makes me wonder if they can find any sizable audience at all.

I'd rather get ChaseHQ on Arcade Archives or something.

@bigsocrates: I have not played it! I remember playing Boxing and Combat which was probably the best game on that system. Also vague memories of Stampede, Pitfall! ..some Star Wars game..? Asteroids probably. I'm not sure what the audience is here really. If those Hamster collections are selling well then I guess apart from Jeff someone is willing to spend money on reliving the past. Granted I'm the last person to talk about this really because I have a hard time going back to something I played last year, much less reliving my childhood memories of sitting a foot away from my 13" TV, wiggling wires to get the picture to stabilize and attempting to figure out what the developer intended for me to do in this blotchy mess of a game washing over me. Even games like Contra which I consider to have been a watershed moment in my life where I decided that I'm not going to play sports and date girls but instead I'll sit inside behind closed curtains playing these vid-ya-games all day, I have a hard time going back to. Well .. I actually wouldn't mind having Contra on my PS4.

so what happened to these? I was kinda liking the idea of getting these

@bradbrains: according to amazon, they're supposedly going to come out on either October 12th or November 1st (there are two different listings)

Oct. 11 for PS4, Nov. 1 for bOne.

So you should be able to get 'em now, no matter what you have.