10 Best Video Games Of 2024 You're NOT Playing
6. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
There's no other way to say this: If you care about gaming history, you'll care about everything Atari is doing right now.
Going from titans of the industry to one the most dirt-on-your-shoe companies around for literal decades, following younger CEO Wade Rosen taking over in 2021, we've seen nothing but genuinely well-meaning ideas since.
Classic games have been given remasters and overhauls, "Atari 50" is a low-key groundbreaking way to present gaming history; a series of interviews with legendary creators, alongside playable prototypes of every game and idea mentioned along the way, plus some completely new remakes at the end, to show what an idea conceptualised in 1982 might look like on modern hardware. Internal documents, rough pencil sketches, feedback exchanges between departments - everything is scanned in high res alongside, so you get an unprecedented look into how video games were made.
No I'm not sponsored by Atari but I am begging more companies to adopt this approach. The Last of Us 2's PS5 version having playable cut levels with director's commentary should be the tip of the iceberg.
Alongside all this is the Gold Master series; that now signature interview-and-gameplay approach, but made to spotlight individual figureheads. 2023 had Prince of Persia creator and industry revolutionary Jordan Mechner show how he pioneered rotoscoping for lifelike movement of characters in 1982, based off watching his brother run and jump, with 2024 now profiling Jeff Minter.
From Grid Runner to Tempest and a ton of Mutant Camels, Minter's laid back work ethic and approach to game design is awesome to see writ large, with Jeff championing the delights of a good cup of tea "powering lines of code", and his own private farm filled with llamas and sheep.
In an industry obsessed with million dollar returns and fleecing customers for all they're worth, Wade Rosen has said none of this is making Atari very profitable; it's literally for the love of the game and there are so many games to talk about.