Back in the 80s, you could play Atari games in a dark room surrounded by other machines with glowing screens. You could also play them at home. Atari now is letting you play their classics for free, right in your browser and they’re calling it the Atari Arcade. All the games are made using Javascript and HTML 5 which load natively in your web browser. Any HTML 5 compatible browser will work including (new versions of) Internet Explorer , Firefox and Chrome.
The current Atari Arcade game list includes…
Asteroids
Centipede
Combat
Lunar Lander
Missile Command
Pong
Super Breakout
Yars’ Revenge
After playing each of the games, I can safely say that these are good ports. Especially for free. All the games are updated with modern, HD graphics. The controls could use some tweaking in some cases, for example slightly slow/twitchy mouse tracking in Super Breakout. For the most part, the Atari Arcade games all play great. Centipede is a particularly attractive port featuring bright and vibrant graphics. Missile Command works great with the mouse and Asteroids is just as hard as its always been.
Not only are these games free to play, but you can also make your own games and submit them to be published on the Atari Arcade site. Developers can use CreateJS along with the Atari Arcade SDK. More documentation on that can be found here. The site is advertiser supported, which we think is quite fair. You can even play the games without ads if you’re using the latest version of Internet Explorer. We hope to see more games added to the Atari Arcade soon.