Atari’s Gravitar Recharged will be released on June 2nd and will offer co-op action with a 2600 era feel

No, Atari isn’t dead yet. As long as anyone can still remember the brand, someone will release smaller and smaller titles under it. But sometimes very nice ones and Gravitar Recharged looks like one too. The basic principle is very simple: Gravity pulls you down more or less on different planetary surfaces and you fight against it with your jets.

That alone wouldn’t be without it, see Moonlander, but there’s plenty of Aline counter-defense here, around whose shots and ships you maneuver elegantly while you yourself don’t always fire well-placed shots. The look is that of an early 80s watercolor piece of art that you can now get in a gold frame in the Asia import export shop to make a statement in your own home. I’m not sure exactly what that is either. Matching this, there is synth music specially composed for the game by Megan McDuffee, the Swiss army knife of synthwave support.

Grvitar offers a co-op mode for this 2600 game design, because rowing around wildly in the atmosphere with two is definitely more fun. But it’s not quite as primitive as it used to be, there are 24 missions in a kind of Aracde mode story, lots of extra weapons, global ranking lists and “groovy missions and funky galaxies”. Sure, why not. Atari has had worse.

Gravitar Recharged is out on 6/2/22 for pretty much everything: Switch, PC (Steam, Epic Store), PS5, PS4, Xbox, iOS, Android and Atari VCS. No, not the old thing, but Atari’s modern and amazingly expensive mini-PC in a 2600-look case. The original Gravitar appeared in the arcade in 1982 and 83 for the 2600. The game’s gravity tricks were so tricky that while there are players who beat Gravitar, the developers themselves never managed to do it back then.

For those who have lost track of what Atari is today: Not that much has actually happened since 2001. Atari is still Atari SA, which Infogrames and Atari renamed themselves after Infogrames acquired Hasbro Interactive (and thus Atari) in 2001. In 2014 a new strategy was issued for new target groups, the focus should be: LGBT, social casinos, real money gambling and Youtube. Whatever that means, they have been working on a new console since 2017, which is actually a small PC and has been sold as the Atari VCS since 2020. There will be Atari hotels at some point, but whoever goes to the site will get colorful pictures, a vision and Atari merch. But no reservation form yet. Corona was not the best time to plan hotels.