Forty years ago, Atari revolutionized entertainment and jumpstarted the gaming industry by releasing its first arcade game – Pong. Besides Pong, you may also remember other classical Atari games such as Missile Command, Lunar Lander and Centipede.
Last week, the Internet Explorer team announced the launch of Atari Arcade, a new partnership between Microsoft and Atari to bring all of these nostalgic games to the web through the power of HTML5. Games like Pong, Asteroids, Super Breakout and Yars’ Revenge – all reimagined with HTML5 and new multi-player capabilities – come to life on a Windows 8 touch device and IE10. Of course, it also works great in IE9, or on any other modern browser.
Bonus: You’ll be able to play against your Facebook friends. The games are free and, yes, they’re just as addictive as you remember.
“What you really want to be able to do is have a series of games that you think, ‘Gee, I’ve got 10 minutes before I need to pick up the kids from school, and of course, an hour later, the kids are waiting on the curb,’ ” says Atari founder Nolan Bushnell in a behind-the-scenes video about the new project, below.
Developers, game on!
For developers, the team has created an opportunity to build your own games for the Atari Arcade platform. An Atari software development kit is available in the developer behind the scenes section of the site, along with new and updated versions of JavaScript libraries (Create.js, Easel.js, Sound.js) and new tutorials for building HTML5 games. All code is available on our IE GitHub repo here.
Check it out!
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