Atari has certainly been in the retro gaming news a lot lately. Between buying old properties like Berzerk and Bubsy, to announcing a brand new version of the Atari 2600, to their surprisingly robust support of the Atari VCS, Atari has been on a pretty serious mission to improve their standing in the gaming community. Their most recent headlines stem from their purchase of AtariAge. Now, if you’ve been around the retro gaming scene for a while, you’ve likely heard that name before, but what is it? Is it a forum? A store? A magazine? Well, it’s kind of all of the above. 

The first thing to know is that there’s a difference between Atari Age and AtariAge. That’s right! Atari Age is not AtariAge! But AtariAge got its name from Atari Age, which is where our story begins. 

You’re probably familiar with Nintendo Power. That was Nintendo’s propaganda magazine they created back in 1988 (or 1987 if you want to count the Nintendo Fun club Newsletter) in order to keep their fans informed on all the latest and greatest from the house that Mario built. (Okay, it’s technically the house that playing cards built, but you get my meaning). Nintendo was hardly the first video game hardware manufacturer to get into the magazine publishing game though. Atari, the previous kings of the home video game market, also had their own magazine, and it was called Atari Age. 

The first issue came out in the summer of 1982 as a reward for new Atari Club members. As for the content of the magazine, it’s exactly what you’d expect. Its sole purpose was to drum up excitement for upcoming Atari projects, and that’s precisely what it did! It’s actually quite a fascinating read today to hear about all the fun stuff Atari was up to back then from Atari’s own perspective. Heck, they even interviewed Pac-Man himself! What fun! 

The magazine ran for 11 issues over the course of about 2 years. It never gained the level of popularity that Nintendo Power did, but it’s the kind of thing that’s looked back on with fondness by fans of a certain age. 

And by that I mean me. I am fans of a certain age. 

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About 14 years later, the internet had caught on and a group of Atari fans created a website called AtariAge, named after the classic gaming magazine. AtariAge has since become an internet mainstay for a multitude of reasons. 

First, it's home to one of the most comprehensive catalogs of Atari products on the internet. Every game for every Atari platform is detailed with images, descriptions, rarity ratings, variants, and more. It’s not 100% complete because nothing ever is, but it’s a heck of a resource when learning about Atari and its history. 

Next, there’s the store. AtariAge has been and continues to be pretty much THE place to get homebrew Atari games. 2600, 7800, 5200, Jaguar, if it’s an Atari platform, they have games for it. And not just Atari either! They have games for ColecoVision and Commodore 64, the excellent Edladdin controllers, various other hardware, reproductions, and more. They’ve been at it for a very long time, and their reputation in that department speaks for itself. 

Of course being owned by Atari now raises a few questions in the storefront department. AtariAge recently went ahead and removed any homebrew games that infringed on any copyrights, but how will they handle future games like this? There’s a pretty vocal sect of the community who aren’t going to be very happy if all those kinds of projects are squashed. And what about stuff like Flash Carts? Does Atari actually know what a GameDrive is? I would assume yes, but who knows? 

Finally, we have the forums. These are incredibly active pages where fans from all walks of life come to talk about all things retro gaming. This is a huge part of what makes AtariAge AtariAge, as this community has been fostered over the past few decades and is very important to a number of people. 

The thing is, this community has historically been pretty unwelcoming to any new iterations of Atari. While the majority of the AtariAge community consists of some pretty great retro gaming fans, there’s a contingent of gatekeeping that tends to go on over there, especially in terms of anyone who is optimistic about the future of Atari instead of assuming the worst of them. 

There’s also the whole Intellivision Amico thing. AgariAge effectively gave Tommy Tallarico a platform to spout off a litany of (what we now know were) blatant lies about his company and their theoretical upcoming product. This rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Granted, they were hardly the only ones who saw merit in letting Tommy speak his peace. We actually hosted him on our podcast after he made some rather wild claims on social media that we wanted to confront him about. It went more or less okay, but I personally had no idea just how much he was lying directly to us during the show. I probably should have, but live and learn, right? 

So that’s the basics of what AtariAge is. It’s a name that has a long history with Atari itself, and for me, I think it’s really cool to see that name once again under the official Atari umbrella. I’ve been really impressed with the way Atari has been handling itself lately. There are things that still give me pause, like their involvement in cryptocurrency, but programs like that were already in place before the current CEO took over, and while I may not like everything they’re involved with, it would be poor form for them to leave those customers in the lurch by abandoning those aspects of the business outright too. It’s a tough position to be in, and I think they're handling themselves pretty well. 

I still don’t know how I feel about their recent acquisition of a different retro gaming site MobyGames, but the site seems to have been left to its own devices as promised, which bodes well for AtariAge. Still, there are a lot of folks out there who fear AtariAge is about to head down a similar path as the old NintendoAge site did. That was a similar site whose fate involved being purchased, WATA games, lots of shady activity, and the eventual gutting and shutting down of everything that made people like it in the first place. I don't personally think AtariAge is headed in that direction, but again, time will tell. 

For now, I’m just excited to see what the new Atari is going to do next. They’ll likely never be able to build themselves up to the level they were back in the 70s and 80s, but the niche they’ve carved out for themselves seems to suit them well. This is by far my favorite incarnation of the company since I was a kid, and I think as long as other fans are willing to give them a chance, things will only get better from here. But I’ve been wrong before. 

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