Retronauts - 506: Retro Compilations

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Double feature! A ramble about retro compilations with Lewis Clark of SegaDriven.com, and an interview with Mike Mika and Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse about their masterpiece compilation, Atari 50. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, Jeremy Parrish shakes up a can of beer that explodes in Stuart Chip's hand, facilitating a hospital visit in which the various hosts of Retronauts visit him to remember past episodes, or something. Hello, welcome to Retronauts being hosted by me, Stuart Gip, otherwise known as the British one of Retronauts. Today we've got something of a loosey-goosey, nice and juicy episode in which myself and my esteemed guest, I will introduce momentarily while they sit there awkwardly on their hands, will discuss a very fine subject, which is compilations. I was going to say the subject, and I started.

humble over my words and I've just instantly ruined the episode. Anyway, joining me for the first time on Retronauts, but hopefully not the last, is the proprietor of SegaDriven.com, which is both an excellent website, blog and YouTube channel showcasing lesser known, lesser seen games. In fact, why didn't you explain it? It's Lewis Clark. Hello, Lewis. Hello. Yeah, thank you very much for having us on. Yeah, so, yeah, I'm the webmaster and lead writer at Sega which is a Sega News and Sega history blog and website I guess try and catalog a load of hardware and game stuff and merchandise and things and just whatever takes my fancy really and I have an accompanying YouTube channel where I basically do the exact same thing whatever takes my fancy I'll make a video on and it just seems to always be something weirder and more obscure as time goes on I've covered things like weird Sega knockoffs on different systems, essentially.

Yeah, I have been fascinated by, you know, just the stranger side of their back catalogue. And obviously, retro stuff in particular, which is probably why you asked me to be on this one, because we'll talk about retro compilations, eh? Oh, yeah, I only just got that connection. Wow. Yeah, no, yesterday we're talking about compilations,

which is a subject that if you've been following my writing on retronauts.com, you'll know why I am sort of madly obsessed with. because there's nothing better than a repackaging of old video games in new skin. It's just, it is just the best thing ever. Whenever a retrocomplication comes out, I just become inordinately excited. And it's been a bit of a renaissance period for them in the last few years. Thanks to digital eclipse coming up with their banger compilations.

What I'll note at this point is, as I said, this is going to be quite a loose, informal sort of discussion. This is not like an actual potted history of a retro compilation. Yeah. You know, I've had some comments that I don't explain enough the thing that we're talking about. Yeah. We did a Lemmings episode recently, me and Dave Bulmer, and I got some comments like, why don't you explain what Lemmings is? The reason I didn't do that, I guess I figured I thought everyone knew what Lemmings was, but I'll do it now. I'll explain the basic premise of retro compilation for the listeners, which is repackaging.

This is kind of an out-there example, but the most prominent one is probably Super Mario All-Stars, even though it's not a true. retro compilation in a sense it's bringing together Super Mario Brothers and etc. Together in one cartridge that's what a compilation is one CD with many old games on it and sometimes some extras

a good place to start because I don't want to get into the whole Sinclair Spectrum Oh I mean there's so much home computer stuff isn't there where it's just like a big compilation included with your brand new Amiga or whatever and it's just like

Yeah, that's great and all but I think we're kind of trying to focus on maybe a generation older, you know, so that it feels more like an actual throwback, essentially, compilation. Yeah, but we couldn't ignore

Mega Games. Yeah, well Mega Games 1 is like one of my first games. I got my Mega Drive on the Christmas in 19901 and it came with a copy of Sonic 1 and Mega Games won and then I proceeded to get all of those collections. There's three

of them. Well, there's technically more because there's weird like six pack versions which came much later but the first three are basically the core sort of basis of it and um yeah they're they're just a great way to get a load of first party saga games for a budget price yes i'm assuming that this is a dumb thing but i'm assuming in america they were still called megagames like they didn't rename it like jenny games or something so i know for a fact that the first one actually does have a different name in America, which is a bit strange. I think if, let me just

quickly check it because it's a bit like out there in comparison. Yeah. These are 92 and 93 instantly. This is it. Yeah. So the first one is called triple score. Three games in one. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What's wrong with these people? Just mega games, right?

I suppose they have to rename it because they don't have the Mega Drive out there. Yeah. Well, then just don't rename the Megadrive. Call it the Mega Drive because it's a call a name. Exactly right. The Mega Drive. It's called the Mega Drive in more places than the rest of the world, so why is bloody Genesis there? Is the console a book of the Bible? No,

is it a band at one point confronted by Phil Collins no it's not? So... Exactly that, so yeah. I wish it was sometimes, but yeah. But yeah, I suppose the real highlight of these is Mega Games too, which basically just gives you three of the absolute

best first-party Sega Mega Drive games, so you get Golden Axe Streets of Rage and Revenge of Shinobi, all classics, all worth your time. I didn't have this experience, but I think about what it would be like as a child to receive that for, like, Christmas or something. You would not play anything else for just, you know, months, essentially. You're sorted. I mean, I have nostalgia for the first one, Column, Super Hang on, and World Cup Italia and I-T, but it's got to be said that there's only really one game there that I would say is great, and that's probably super hang-on.

And then, Mega Games 3 I also like, because I'm a big fan of Alien Storm, another great... Yeah, Alien Storm's awesome. But it's also got Super Monarcho GP on it and Super Thunderblade, which is Toss. So, yeah, nothing to write home about on Mega Games 3, really, but... Yeah, Super Thunderblade, that's... No version of that, like, home version, apart from... Wait, there was the 3DS version, wasn't there? That's technically just Thunderblade.

Super Thunderblade is technically a sequel. I see. Okay. Yeah, it's not a great game. There's... I mean, it can't... The Mega Drive can't reproduce the... super scaler sort of like, you know... No, it's a bummer. Graphics, so

it makes it look really horrible and stilted as like, you know, sprites trying to draw themselves in closer to the camera and it just looks really wrong. Yeah, and other than some here and there sort of two in one compilations, like the Codemasters

compilations and things. Yeah, yeah. I would say, we've already mentioned it briefly, but the next I would say major game compilation, the one that really put them on the map, to be honest, well, Super Mario, All-Stars. Absolutely, absolutely. And, of course, the revision that came out, which also added World, which made it one of the most, arguably one bagger cartridges ever made.

That cartridge is insane. Like, the fact that you're getting, yeah, one, two, three, lost levels and Super Mario World on one cartridge. That's incredible value for money. The only downer for Mary Wallstars for me, and I'm going to, I know whenever I talk about this, I honestly think people are going to try and find where I live and hit me. this is quite well known but for Mario Brothers and Lost Levels they changed the way

that bricks break when you hit them you're supposed to bounce straight off them downwards like with momentum like it they prang you back down almost and in this they don't you keep going up through them

so when you're running and you hit a brick you can get hitched on the side of the blog you lose your momentum essentially you lose momentum yeah and it turns out that it really was like someone went into the code and found out it really was just like a

one where there should have been a zero. Oh, really? That's interesting. Holy crap. Yeah, and that fixes it. And it's such a prominent error that whenever this cartridge comes up as like, okay, very famously, to me, in UK magazine, game magazine media, the popular Nintendo magazine Total

had a cover, which was just a massive silver, like platinum, 99%. We reviewed this game. It got 99%. Okay. Which is like an absurd score If you're familiar with how scores work But for me, like, I reviewed this for Nintendo Life And I got shouted at because I gave it a 7

And the reason I gave it a 7 is because the Nez versions are still better Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, they're mechanically the correct thing that you're expecting to play, right? Mario 2 is fine, Mario 3 is fine, and Mario World is fine. But in terms of movement,

Mario 2 to me is the only, I mean, I would rather play All-Stars Mario 2 than there's Mario 2, because I think it is an all-round visual improvement, and it plays exactly the same. Oh, yeah, yeah. Mario 3, it plays great, but I don't like the overhaul. It makes some of the more abstract levels look kind of boring. I can see that.

But it's still a bangor cartridge. And Mario World, Mario World has been slightly revised as well. I think Luigi, they made him actually have unique sprites. Yeah, he's got a lot more character. He does, like, knee slides and stuff. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. So it's a good thing. Yeah, it is an absolute banger.

And it's really strange that the we re-release later on that came out for the anniversary doesn't include Mario World. It's just like, why not just go in the... That re-release is just, like, that's what people... I don't like saying this because it's not a criticism, I think, has any validity, but that's what people are talking about when they talk about a ROM dump. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. Because I think it more or less is just the SNES version running on disc, isn't it? Yeah, essentially under emulation, yeah, yeah. Which, again, like, emulation is important.

Let's not be around the bush. Like, it's incredibly important. And especially when we get to a certain era in our list, like, it's so imperative to basically running all of these games on more modern hardware and, you know, not having to individually reprogram them like we're seeing with this collection in particular. Yes. Because, yeah, you get the authentic experience via emulation. Like, all right, yes, it may introduce some input lag,

but it's negligible for having an absolute banger of a compilation full of absolute, you know, just a huge list of games, which, you know, you know, will come in time. I've got a prediction that the both of us are going to say the phrase absolute banger about a thousand times on this episode. It's just the new hotness. It's the new hotness. So three years later, you've got to tell me about this one.

I'm not actually familiar with it. I watched your video about it. Yeah, yeah. Williams Arcade Classics for Megadrive and Game.com 96, and I bought this on the strength of your video because I was amazed they managed

to make such an authentic-looking Robotron on Mega Drive. I haven't played it yet, though, so you've got to tell us about this. Well, so we're going to sing their praises a lot throughout this video, but this was developed by Digital Eclipse, one of their first arcade compilations. It was originally released in America

as Williams' Arcade Classics, but by the time it got power release, the merger with Midway had happened. So they renamed the Midway Archly Classics for the Power Regions. And yeah, you get Defender, Defender 2, as also known Stargate, Joust, Robitron 284, and Sinistar. That is wild. That's a great compilation right there,

and it plays surprisingly well. Even Robitron, which you can enhance on the six-button megadepad by pressing the mode button, and it kind of gives you an approximate. of a second stick. Yeah, so wait, with that it would be like Y is up to fire A is left, B is down

and C is right. That sounds really good. It's tough to get used to, but you do pick with it eventually. The reason why I wanted to talk about the Gamecom version as well in particular is that port is also surprisingly good because the Gamecom actually has a diamond

configuration for its face buttons, which means it's quite natural to use that as a second stick for Robotron. It sounds like it might be the best gamecom game. It probably is, to be honest. The only thing that it really suffers from is the fact that the gamecom screen is ghosty as all hell. So, like, as you move around, it's not too bad for games like Robitron and Joust where it's fixed screen. But stuff like Defender obviously gets very ghosty as it moves around.

But, yeah, it's a surprising little compilation. And it also has a different front end to the Mega Drive version. The Mega Drive version's menu is very bare bones, whereas the Gamecom one has like, you basically walk into a little arc and all their games are, like, presented as cabinets, which you select. So that's really fun. That's probably one of the earliest times I think I've ever seen, like, an arcade-style presentation for a menu.

Yeah, that's a motif that keeps coming back as well. Absolutely, absolutely. But, yeah, a surprisingly good little port, considering. So the Megadryv version, just real quick. Yeah, yeah. That's got to be reprogrammed. That can't be emulation, surely. Absolutely not.

No, it's not. Yeah. They're new versions. It's just very good interpretations of, they probably, you know, just had to eyeball them using actual arcade hardware and just be like, okay, this is how this is supposed to feel, I guess.

They most likely didn't have a source going to work with. So, yeah, especially built with it being a, you know, it wasn't developed in-house by Williams or Midway. So, yeah, a really good early arcade compilation, well worth checking out. Yeah, and the next year on Saturn, also

on Saturn, well, I was about to say, also on Sega, I've obviously made that clear now. Yeah. One of the most beloved compilation, Sonic Jam. Yeah, oh my God. Yeah. I mean, it sets the bar so high that, like, even the most recent Sonic Origins

compilation feels like a bit of a step down from Sonic Jam. Yeah. I mean, Sonic, we'll get to it, but Sonic has a really check of history for me with compilations. And Sonic Jam, I mean, Sonic Jam has its own problems. It has its own bugs. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But it also has its own

bog fixes, which is kind of mad. Yeah. Because it's, again, it's ports. This is not emulation. No. These are ports of these are ports of these games and they add, I mean, you've got Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles, which you can then respectively lock on to each game in a really nice little menu where you physically have to actually look at on, which I really like. But what makes it interesting other than the major feature which we'll talk about is, you've got your choice of what is it like original,

normal and easy. Yes, yeah. And original is the unmolested like exactly as they were on the Mega Drive version. Yeah, but the normal mode is like a, is like a bug fixed version. version, which changes some bits, yeah, to make it a little bit more fair. Like, one of my favourite things it does is in the first, well, the second act of Green Hill Zone on Sonic 1, there is a section where there's some sort of like, some platforms that move up and down, and underneath them is a pit, and in the original game, it's like instant death. They block those pits up on the Sonic Jams version, because I'm assuming they just feel like

that's a little bit unfair in the first stage of the game to give you an instant death, you know? Yeah, because you can fall between the spikes and just die. That's exactly what happens. So again, that's just a nice little touch and a little bit of like a quality of life improvement that this game does. The one that's, the one that I remember is the fact they got rid of the troll pit in Mystic Cave where you can't get out. They put a spring in there. The episode Legends. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

And if I remember correctly, don't they get rid of the barrel from Sonic 3? Like just straight up, it's just gone. Like, yeah, that's unfair. I stand against that. That's an act of cowardice. That barrel should be there because the barrel sorts the men from the boys to use it out there. outdated, gendered expression. Whenever people talk about having trouble with the barrel,

I'm just like, don't be so stupid. It's so obvious what you do. How could you not figure this out? I get genuinely salty about it. Yeah, I mean, it's just the way people play games now and the way we used to play games, where you would just try stuff and see what happens is just something that, like,

I think people do need to be spoon-fed a little bit more nowadays. Well, I got on the barrel. I remember playing it as a kid, and I was jumping on the barrel and I, well, this isn't working. What have I got? The only other inputs on this controller. Well, there you go.

The willingness to try stuff out. I just don't think it's that difficult. Yeah, no, this is the thing. I mean, like, God, I must have grown up with so many, like, weird imports and just sort of, like, mucked around with them to figure out how to work it because I couldn't understand the bloody language. Yeah. But, yeah, that's just the way of the world, isn't it?

We shouldn't not mention Sonic World in Sonic World as well. Oh, yeah, that's the major feature I alluded to. Sonic's World, the big polygon blocky 3D take on the museum, which is really rather cool because there's stuff in the museum that I believe is still completely unexplained to this like there's a theatre

you can go to like a cinema where you can watch this utterly bizarre and expensive looking cartoon yeah yeah man of the year yeah incredible stuff like God knows what it was developed for but well worth the watch and again a huge shame that it's just not in Sonic Origins

like why would you not include that my personal assumption is that the cartoon man of the year was possibly one of the pilot pictures for Sonic Eventually, Sonic the Hedgehog. I could see that. I could see that.

Because it does share, I think it shares Sonic's design with that. I might be wrong. I've not seen it for a while. But it's not just that, obviously, there's like a gallery of pictures from, like, the Sonic screensaver and stuff which do turn up and everything else.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But they're cute pictures, so it's okay. No, no, that video gallery in particular is just a fascinating little thing. There's all the, you know, Japanese commercials and things in there and, like, a weird, deleted, like ride that was supposed to happen like a VR style ride

and you can just watch the video of that that never released. That's just so cool it's just wicked stuff. When I was a kid it was the first time I'd seen like the Japanese covers for the games as well. Oh yeah yeah totally. The pop artie amazing yeah but it's just a great that's a nice little touch as well

like the different ports of Sonic Jam in like US Power Region and Japan when you're in the game menu like the cartridges will show their local like artwork which is something that doesn't get replicated a lot with later compilations

down the line which is... Yeah, I mean I guess the only thing I can think of is the Mega Drive Mini which does do that but only when you change it yourself. Absolutely, but we'll get to some bits where that doesn't happen and it's just you can tell like this was this was made on a budget. There was not

the attention and love given to it that something like Sonic Jam has had. And like Sonic Jam, we'll move on from it but it is a compilation that has essentially set a benchmark for Sonic compilations that they have

consistently failed to reach not that they haven't been without their charms but we'll get to it obviously but a little bit

of an obscure one which we should talk about briefly is the 1998 Saturn Konami Antiques MSX collection

UltraPack Which is probably one of the greatest names for a video game ever It really is and it's

what it is is it's a collection of either two or three I forget MSX compilations that were released

on the PS1 but what you get you get a big sub as a game there must be over 20. I'm not going to list them. Yeah. But like all of the versions of Gradius, including Nemesis 2, which is an absolutely amazing, brilliant

schmarp. Stuff like the, and the MSX version of Prodeus is super fun as well. But even stuff like Twemby, Antarctic Adventure. Yep. And the fact you're getting so many games just on the one disc for the Saturnus makes it a bit of an essential, I think. Yeah, I didn't know this existed until you put it in the

list, and I was just like... Yeah. That's going on the emulator later. Obviously, I will acquire it legally and then delete it within 24 hours. Yeah, within 24 hours, obviously. I don't think that I knew this existed until I went researching. Like, I knew that a PS1 games were, because you can still buy them if you have a Japanese account on PS3. Oh, really? That's interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I've talked about it on a previous episode, but the Japanese PS3 store is like the most ridiculous surplus of riches for retrogaming ever. But there's like 400, 500 PS1 games on there. It's like including fully English ones that never got brought over here for some unknown bloody reason. Yeah, what a shame. What a shame. But yeah, no, this is a real, like, little highlight of a package. And one of the things I really like about retro compilations is it's basically just like, well, here's a like a guide essentially to a console or a system that you've never experienced before.

I mean, I have no experience within MSX. So this would be a lovely thing to just sort of like go through. and just explore because yeah there's a really wide list of games here and there's no context necessarily but that you do get

all these great games to try out and they're not particularly complex games either so this is the joy of just old arcade games isn't it? It's very easy to just pick up and play yeah no that's definitely getting checked out after we record today definitely having a look at that

I'm going to be able to be. Yeah. Speaking of arcade compilations, not that we were. Amco Museum series beginning in 1995, running through to 1997. Now, I am staggered that this got fully done, considering that some of the games they start collecting. Yeah, like by the end, like they're clinging desperately to Pac-Man games. Oh, yeah. And I am not saying that those games are bad. I'm saying that they're saving up Pac-Man games to throw in, like, volume four, like, for Christ's sake.

Yeah, Pac-Land. Yeah, I love Pac-Land, but the games that it's on there with, like, I'm not saying they're bad games, but people didn't know what these games were. No, no. Like, retro game was not what it is now. But I think that's why I find Volume 4 and 5 in particular very fascinating. For me personally, I think the PS1 Namco museums are the high bar for retro compilations. because the early ones, you get the classics, right?

So you get a lovely little selection of games. You get your Pac-Mans. You get your Gallagas. You get your Zeevius. You get your mappies and stuff. So, yeah, it's what you expect. But they have this awesome presentation where they're complete ports.

They're not emulated, but they have the arcade boards dip switches as an option that you can muck around with in every single game. You have a virtual museum you can explore in first person, which is an insane level of presentation that just nobody goes to at all. And when you get to volume 4 and 5,

you get the weird stuff, which is even better. So one of the games on Volume 4 is Gempay Tomoden, which gets localized for the first time ever on Namco Museum Volume 4 as the Genji and Hikee clans, which is just a bizarre sort of like samurai horror kind of platformer, but it also changes into a beat-em-up and also a top-down thing. Really cool game.

And then Namco Museum Volume 5 has the Legend of Valky which is a localized version of Alkary No Densetsu. An absolute all-timer, as far as I'm concerned. Really great game that doesn't really get a lot of love. One of my favorite soundtracks in any video game ever as well. Yeah. Just, yeah, really cool stuff. Like just, but like, again, like you say, you could say that it was scraping the bottom

of the barrel, but I like that it goes that weird, you know? Yeah, I mean, so what, from one perspective, like, yeah, I mean, to me, not so much because I know quite a lot of these games. And, like, Namco Museum Encore, which is one of the Japan-only ones. I think there was one other one as well, but I might be wrong about that. Niamke Museum Encore is a little bit. That one's more like, you know, your budget retro compilation. It doesn't have the first-person explorative.

It does have Sky Kid and Rolling Thunder. This is the thing, right? I love Sky Kid. I love Skikin. I love Motos as well, which is another inclusion on that one. So, yeah, like just... I discovered Sky Kid writing a thing for a Retronauts thing, and I never played it before

and I was just like this is great this is a really weirdly complex but very playable schmop with great music that's the joy of exploring Namco stuff to be honest with you

like just a really interesting creative publisher that were just firing on all cylinders in the arcade I remember I'm fairly sure there was some like little Easter eggs you could trigger

and by doing certain actions like you could change the games up a bit or play different versions of the games as well but don't quote me on that I remember reading that on I think gaming Hell, which is that amazing

website. Yes, God, I haven't thought about gaming hell in a long time. Yeah, it was still going. Oh, wow. I don't want to get their I don't want to get their name or pronouns wrong, but the owner of that was on.

Reginald was quite recently, and I had to miss it, and I was quite disappointed. I wish I could have been on there with them. Oh, amazing. But yeah, check it out, still going. Cool stuff. One other thing I'd like to highlight with Volume 4 and 5 in particular

is they've got these really cool, like, in the museum, you can explore this sort of, like, video gallery and they have these bizarre little extras like so there's a there's a genpei tomodden short film in that video gallery which is basically just a samurai movie and it's got all the campy silliness of like a live action you know samurai film and i don't know what it was made for you can watch the entire thing on youtube with english subtitles if you're if you're curious um but yeah it's enormous like it's a whole short film it's crazy and there's a similar thing for baraduke

on volume five there's a little like you know just animated essentially, which kind of gives you like the backstory of the game. Just fun little extras like that. Those are the things that like really elevate a retro compilation for me. Yeah, agreed. It's just like go in on presentation and extras and just make it feel like an actual love letter to those games.

Like it highlight as much stuff as possible. Even just the little rooms for each individual game in the museum have like you can look at the system board and all the flyers and stuff and all the animations for the... characters and the games and stuff. Just an insane level of detail. Yeah, really, really good. But they also had, I'm not sure if it was in the first one, but the later ones, if you didn't want to ask around, you could just pull up a menu by pressing select, I think. Yeah, you can do that in the later ones. Yeah, which is pretty sweet. I think you can do it

in the early ones as well. But the museums in the earlier ones are a little bit more simplistic in comparison to the later ones, which have, you know, a lot more to look at and do and involve yourself. There is even little Easter eggs within the rooms and stuff that you can trigger certain animations with characters and things. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of when I was mentioned earlier about affecting the games. It might be worth looking into because I could have sworn there was stuff

like you could get alternate variants of the games of the stuff by doing certain things. I might have to have a little look at. But that might be bollocks. No, I mean, it's the sort of thing that I wouldn't put it past them to hide and in there because it's just, yeah, it's so... Weren't they also hosted by that robot that's still in?

The receptionist of Namco or something, I can... Oh, the lanky robot. I don't know if... I've never seen them appear in anything else, Maybe I'm mistaken. But if it is a reference, then that's cool. I want to see what that shows up in again.

Yeah, look up Namco receptionist robot and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's kind of great. It's like they have it sitting at like a desk when you go in the Namco Headquarters and stuff. Yeah, you have to sign in with your name and then like that becomes your save file essentially. Not that I've ever been to Namco Headquarters. I have. If I do something. Oh, right.

It looks like a big Toblerone. Perfect. If we're good with Namco Museum I also want to mention that the five volumes The covers spell out Namco Of course, which is basically The first thing anybody does when they gets the whole set You know, like lay out, yep, says Namco

I can read that I, when I don't, because the PS3 doesn't let you Choose the order that your thing is going It's just what you download them, you cannot, the order you download them And you cannot change it Yeah I downloaded them backwards so that it would spell Namco properly

And I think I actually got it wrong And I had to do it over Because I got Namco encore at the beginning Instead of the end That's an insane level of dedication That I fully back in me Absolutely, absolutely Yeah, again, they're all available on the US PSN

If you get on there, I believe And the encore ones are available on the Japan PSN So again, none of them are available on the Europe one Which doesn't affect most of our listeners But it doesn't affect me So, also on PS One, so also on PS1 from a different major, Japanese publisher. We've got Capcom Generations which were released as

individual discs over in Japan, but in Europe we got a four disc box set which contained... I'm just in a list to these because it's not that long. A disc one was Wings of Destiny, it was 1942, 1943 and 93 Kai, which to my

mind, and I'm not dissing these games, is probably the least interesting one because they're all basically the same. Okay. This two was called Chronicles of Arthur, and that was Ghosts and Goblins, Gould and Ghosts, and Super Goals and Ghosts very oddly having a arcade game, sorry SNS game thrown in there. Yeah.

Because that was not, I assumed it was the arcade version or something, but no, it's not. It's the SNS game. There is no real arcade version. I think it may have ended up in a few cabinets, but it's not an actual arcade game. Okay. The third one was the first generation, which had Vulgus, Sonson, Pirateship,

Higamaru, and Exit Xs, which are essentially a very vintage Capcom games. Yeah, yeah. And the final one, Blazing Guns has Commando, Mercs, and Gunsmoke. Now, these are all games that would eventually be bundled together in other compilations, but my word, that Ghost and Goblins Disc, that vulgous Sun-Sun Pirateship, Higromari Disc, and Blazing Guns, man, that's a good collection right there.

No, there's a lot of, you know, prime era, Capcom arcade stuff in here. There was unlockables that were so difficult to get that I did not manage to get them, I believe, little feature shoe. I remember Sonson, one of them, was to get a certain number of the bamboo shoots that spring up at random. Okay. They're not at random, sorry, they're placed in certain places, but when you walk over the ground, they'll spring out. Yeah. And they're quite hard to get because Sonson is really position-based.

It's all about positioning. If you haven't played Sonson, it's one of my favorite arcade games, and I only discovered it through this compilation. Oh, okay. I didn't even know what it was. And I was like, oh, my God, this game from the early 80s is actually amazing. Yeah, yeah. I have a great time with Sonson. Again, I didn't know that this, like, compilation existed in Power Territory.

I knew the individual volumes, you know, existed in Japan and stuff. Yeah. Because one of my favorite viewing habits is a virtual gaming library, which is basically a YouTube channel dedicated to chronology. Chronologing. What's the word? Chronologizing. Chronologizing, yeah, an entire system's catalog of games.

And, yeah, I remember seeing them show up in that, like, in the sad. on the Saturn and PS1 ones. But, yeah, I didn't realize that there was a four-disc compilation that we got in Power Territories, which is probably stupidly expensive now, so I will never own it. When I bought it from Game, I believe it was a tenor. Wow, okay. I don't think that it has actually attained the value that some of the other ones have because the games are so freely available.

Yeah, yeah. But I could be wrong about it. I mean, they're about to be on the friggin' Evercade XP, so... Yeah, yeah, true. Yeah, I mean, they're on everything, but it was a nice compilation to have, especially introducing me to, like, Giga Mario Sanson and like Merks, which I love, I love Merks. It's such a good game. I only ever played the Mega Drive port myself, but yeah, I'll have to have a little bit of the arcade version. I think I have that, but I'm much more familiar with the arcade version, so I'll have to go back to it sometime.

You need to give that some time. And that wasn't it for arcade games on the PS1, because there's another one called Arcade Party Pack, which I remember seeing around, but never actually playing. So this was one of the first arcade compilations I ever owned, actually. So this is a sort of a midway and Atari games focused collection from 99, and also developed by Digital Clips. Oh, wow. So, yeah, 720, Smash TV, Clax, Rampage, Super Sprint, and Tubin. First time playing any of these games and basically fell in love with them.

There's a lovely little extras menu where they actually interview all the developers and just, you know, they talk about their time developing the games and what their goals were. I remember those. I think they reused the same interviews for Midway Arcade. That would make sense. With the same condition like video. Oh, they're horrendous, the quality of them. And what's even worse is that the PAL version of Arcade Party Pack,

because it's obviously running at 50 hertz, the audio starts to lose sync with the video as the longer you watch it. So, yeah, kind of spoiled a little bit, unfortunately, being in the PAL territory. But still great games. I mean, like, Smash TV is a huge. highlight for me and Super Sprint in particular I love. I have an obsession with locked screen racing games where you can see

the entire circuit on one in one thing without having to scroll around and Super Sprint is basically the pinnacle of that. Yeah, great game. Feels awesome when you slide around corners and stuff. I contend that Super Off-Road may be the pinnacle of that. Fair enough.

I mean, look, it's a great game. I'm not going to knock it, but I just love the way the cars move around the corners in Super Sprint. You just let go. be an episode in the future about single screen. Yeah, that would be fun. I do have a huge thread I created on Twitter of like every

one I could discover. Every time it pops up I'm just like happy to see it. Well, there it is. It's a lovely aesthetic just seeing the entire circuit in one hit. So yeah. I mean, for me, the pick of this collection, other than Smash TV, I mean, it's Clax, baby. Clax is a great puzzler. I know it gets a lot of flack for being

quite simple, but it's just a nice time. It needs the 90s and it's time for Clacks. Absolutely. And I just like the sound of the weird tiles as they click down the thing, you know? It's a good time. Now, this I want to say was several compilations

in the US, like other than an arcade party pack, there was like Midway arcade and there was Atari arcade as well. So somehow these things have come together. I don't think. Yeah, we didn't. But somehow they've come together here. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's obviously, you know, that must have been our equivalent essentially. But yeah. I mean,

ignoring some other collections, like there is Atari anniversary and Atari Redux and stuff which we're not going to cover there's so much on the PS1 like it's very much the first boom for retro compilations totally as we mentioned this is only a kind of loose thing I mean it's going to be longer than I expected

I think this might actually become a two-parter at this rate oh god but Sonic Mega Collection 2002 I mean got to talk about Sonic Mega Collection because in theory it's amazing yeah yeah absolutely the games you're getting here all of the main line games plus 3D Plus plus plus

Mimbing machine, et cetera, and so forth. Flicky wristar, I don't know if it's Ristar, I always call him Ristar. It's Ristar. If you've ever looked at the Japanese phonetics for the name, it's Ristu-Tar. Ristutar. Yeah, yeah. Ristar, okay. And I think it is supposed to be a pun on his wrists, essentially, like, because he's got stretchy,

wristy arms, you know? Yeah, because he's a bit of a rister, that's why. Get it? A slammed wristar. This compilation is the reason I spent. so many years not like King Restar. Oh, really? Yeah, because playing that thing

with the GameCube controller is like tearing your own teeth out as far as I'm concerned. That's true. That's true. You can't do diagonals and the whole game is about doing diagonals. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. But then when I find that, when I played that game on a Mega Drive mini, I was like, oh. That's how it works. I see. The MegaDocopad is supposed to be comfortable.

What an unusual thing. Now, what kills this compilation for me, and everyone probably knows this already, is the fact that it locks games behind unlockable conditions that are just stupid Yeah, it's the worst, yeah If it was honestly, I could tolerate it

If it was like Finish Sonic 1, 2 and 3 And you'll unlock Sonic and Knuckles I would be, that would be stupid But I'd be okay with that Yeah, yeah But it's not It's like play Sonic the Hedgehog

50 or 30 times, I forget how many Yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous And you'll unlock another game I'll play all the games 30 times You'll unlock say Ristar So you basically just sit on a menu you're going in and out of the game very quickly because each time you enter the game counts.

Every time you do that, it does the whole right into the game log thing. Yeah, yeah. It always saves afterwards. It's just tedious, like, but it's the only way to get, you know, Sonic 3 and Knuckles, which is like the best way to play Sonic 3 and Sonic Knuckles. Exactly, yeah. It's bonkers.

Like, just that that is the way you have to achieve that. All it guarantees is that you will at some point spend an hour and a half doing that, like just opening a closing games until the game lock disappears. One of my GameCube memory cards. wiped itself recently and I had to do it all again and it was just like God I do not miss having to do this again for the long for the umt teeth time I got I got my friend uh Leanne to just come around with with her memory card yeah just copy a save that's the way that's the way to do it yep yeah I did the same thing with someone I remember someone at

college I gave I gave them my memory card and they came back the next day with like 180 emblem clear saves of Sonic Adventure 2 and stuff yeah I did the exact same thing with the friend yeah I'm not doing it I want to I want to play a Green Hills I not 3D, I don't want to do all that crap and play that rubbish game. Yep, that good shout. But yeah, other than Mega Collection, there's also Mega Collection Plus, which came out on PS2, Xbox,

and PC in the next couple of years, offers most of the same things, except also you get some GameCube, sorry, some Game Gear games thrown in there. The Game Gear games that weren't included as extras in Sonic Adventure DX Directors' Cup, which is just like

absolute scenes. I mean, it's nice of to get them out there. Yeah. But it's such a weird compilation. You know, it's just a strange thing because they do eventually show up the rest of them on Sonic Jem's collection.

But yeah, it's a bit of a strange thing to just be, just get them all on there. What's the point? You can get the ooze and comics zone for some reason, I guess because they were also developed by Sega Technical Institute.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's the only connection. I believe there was also Vector Man on there, one and two. Yes. Which you unlock by having a save of Sonic Heroes or something? Something like that, yeah, yeah.

So it's like insult to injury, isn't it? Like, not only if you wasted your time playing Sonic Heroes, you now have to play... Outed yourself as a Sonic Heroes player, yeah, yeah. Actually, I quite like Vecta Man, I have to be honest. I do quite like Vecta Man 1, but Vecta Man 2's way too dark to play. Vecta Man 2 is like, yeah, the same thing except you can't see anything coming since it's dark all the time.

Yeah, yeah, not of that one. But it's okay, I mean, these are fine compilations providing you can get them unlocked. There are some sound issues, but only real, like, turbo nerds are going to notice them. Yeah, yeah, this is the thing, isn't it? Yeah. And then we get the weird collection, Sonic Jelms.

Oh, I loved this thing. Oh, this is the one that Vector Man's on. I'm talking complete crap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, Sonic Jams has got Vexam and one of it. Yeah, yeah, sorry, I messed up, but it's not on the PSC one. It's all good, it's all good. But, yeah, this is, I've probably played this one the most,

despite the fact that it really isn't the best collection. I mean, to me, I mean, I unlocked the entire, like, museum in this, which is an absurd undertaking, but that was the years when I had time. Yeah, well, didn't we all? But, yeah. The real, I mean, what this has is, because at the time, these were games that were not only, like, kind of scarce, but they were mostly, correct me from wrong,

mostly not emulated. So, this is the only way you were going to play them unless you have a copy of Sonic R. Yeah, yeah. The fighters hadn't been ported in any respect. No, yeah, so that is a brand new port for this version. and Sonic CD and Sonic R are the PC versions, in fact, ported over to the DECD version. I actually did import the Japanese version of this because I wanted the Sonic CD soundtrack that I know, and not the American one, no offense, Ben to Nilsson.

Yeah, the Pell version of this had the American soundtrack, didn't it? It did, it did, which is a real strange thing. I don't hate that soundtrack, but it's not got 2-2 Sonic Warriors. Yeah, yeah. What's the point of it? This is what I was saying before, you know, where you get the lazier collections where it's just like, right, okay, every western region gets the same thing instead of it being localized for the specific regions,

which is a real shame. But, yeah, the Japanese version is a banger because it also adds the Streets of Rage trilogy and Bonanza Brothers as extras as well. Yeah, bare knuckle. Yeah, damn, right. Really good stuff. Are they unlocked from the beginning?

I cannot remember if you have to unlock them or not, but to be honest with you, however the way you got them, I was happy to unlock it because it's just like, yeah. You also get Bonanza Brothers, which is a banger. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's a real good game. Real good game.

And, yeah, obviously we get the remaining game gear games on this collection as well. So you get Sonic 2. Yeah, so you get to play secret hidden best Sonic Game Tales Adventures. Yeah, I mean, it's a banger, isn't it? It's a great game. The only bad thing about it is you have to play as Tails, he's a twat. Controversial opinion there. Oh, he's just such a loser.

I hate Tales, man. He's like, oh, can I come with you? And just, like, banging into bombs and losing all your rings and just, uh. And then they'd like, oh, let's make him, uh, Into an inventor, because that's not annoying. So now you've got Jimmy Neutron following you around all the time going, according to my calculations, shut up. I'm sorry, I got in a bit of a run there.

It's all good, it's all good. Sonic shouldn't hang out with Tails. Sikes cool and Tails is lame. Sonic should bully Tales. That's how it should be going. Ineventedly becomes cool because he hangs around with a cool person, right? That's how it works. He's just chasing after Sonic's fame, isn't it?

The power is in your mind To sit the fan that they can't cut in your mind We can talk about how much I hate tales And the I hate tales dedicated podcast But we've got compilations to cover my friend let's do it let's do let's do some midway yeah midway let's get through these because these are

vast there's three of them midway arcade treasures one two and three what a set though oh my gosh like it's worth having all of them because you just get an absolute like history lesson on midway here it's awesome yeah the only one I'd say that's probably not worth your time

is maybe three because as much as there's some good games in there they are not the best versions of those games they run like crap on PS2. I can't speak for the Xbox version because I've never played it, but, you know, San Francisco Rush Hydro Thunder

and like Offroad Thunder and things like that, they're all proper 3D arcade games and they just, the frame rate is abysmal on PS2. I hate to complain about that, but Hydro Thunder's not too bad, but again, it's not the best way

to play that game. But yeah, the first two collections are just a potted history of like the absolute best stuff. I can't remember Stunwell or not been running that well. Yeah, which is strange, right? Because it's very simplistic

polygonal game. Yeah, but it's also, I think, it's his only home port. Yeah, because the only other one is on the bloody links, isn't it? So, yeah. Yeah, it's a shame, because Sandrunner's really cool. Yeah, no, it is a shame.

Again, I can't speak for the Xbox version. Maybe they run a little bit better on there, but that PS2 version is not so hot. But the original two, we're talking, I mean, the first one repeats a lot of the stuff that was on, if not all the stuff that was on, Arcade Party Pack, but also adds a load of stuff like root beer

tapper and like odd stuff like Satan's Hollow and bubbles, which is awesome. I think that was the one that was like unreleased, am I wrong about that? I'm not too sure regarding bubbles, but yeah, it's a cool game, very weird little game but yeah, very good fun. And there's also Marble Madness, which is an absolute Alzheimer's. Of course, and Robotron with

which you can play with Twin Sticks finally for the first time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love the presentation of Midway Arcade Treasures where it's like this weird Pyramid essentially Yeah, they're exploring and it's all the little treasures in there. Each game is kind of like represented by a symbol instead of its name which is confusing as all hell

but I kind of like the just a presentation overall is just kind of fun and silly you know, it's just a real time. Yeah, they sort of they dump that for two and three it's like a... Yeah, they just move straight to a sort of a unified menu system, don't they? Yeah, yeah, which is a bit of a shame. I mean, they make up for it with the games they include

though. Oh yeah, absolutely. but then there's a real strange thing in that Midway Arcade Treasures 2 includes Mortal Kombat 2 and 3, which are probably the ones you want to play more than the original but why not have the original on there, right? It's really weird. Yeah, but it is on the extended play

version of PSP, on PSP. You can get all three Mortal Kombat's on a handheld on the PSP version. That's really weird. Yeah, odd is all hell. That's a nice little collection as well. I thought it was because it was included with like Mortal Kombat Deception or something. I might be wrong about that.

It might be a case. Like, you know, it was out at a similar time as another game that had it on. There was some weirdness going up with Mortal Kombat around this time. I think Shaolin Monks might have the original Mortal Kombat on as an unlockable. Yeah, there is really...

I think that might be two, actually, again. Yeah, yeah. But I've been playing Shaolin Monks lately because it runs really well on the Steam deck. Oh, lovely. Lovely stuff. But yeah, I've been wanting to get a bit of a white whale for me, so he's play it with my mate and I really want to finish it.

Oh, definitely. I haven't finished it myself, but a good game, totally. Yeah. But other than the Mortal Kombat you've got, like, NARC, which I love. You've got APB. You've got Total Carnage, which is like the even more mental sequel to Smash TV. Yeah, yeah. You've got Primal Rage, which is an absolute cult hit. Yep, totally. Rampage World Tour, mate. One of my favorites Rampage World Tour on the PS1 I used to absolutely live for that game. Oh, what a game, man. What a game. Yay. I got fun memories of hanging out with my best friend at the time, playing that on PS1, randomly mashing buttons during loading

screens and triggering a secret code, which made us all go absolutely crazy. Amazing. What I find. Yeah. Yeah. And then, Every time we got a new screen for them and I would just start tapping random buttons and I hope it would lock stuff and sometimes it did. Yeah, yeah. What a game. Oh, yeah, no, amazing game, amazing game. Yeah, like just loads of great stuff on here, man.

Like, well worth owning all three of these. Xenophobe, a game about being racist. Don't think that's quite what they were going for there, but yeah. Yeah, you can just be incidentally racist while playing the game, but I prefer that you weren't. Yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad. But yeah, no, just awesome collections. And like I say, that, that PSP version is also worth owning. It's essentially if you want some Mortal Kombat on the go.

Yeah, very, very good versions. Yeah, definitely. I'm sure there's reasons why Mortal Kombat Purists don't like it, but I don't really know what they are. Oh, I mean, this is one of those things, isn't it? Like, with retro compilations, people do get, like, hung up on the quality of the emulation and input lag and things like that. And at the end of the day, that's fine. But these are not really, these compilations aren't really made for people like that. looking for the absolute best way to play a certain game.

This is just a way to get a potted history of, you know, a publisher or a system and play it at a level that is decent enough to enjoy. And these are all solid enough ways to play these games. Yeah, that's something that we, I can't say about something on next in line, though, I have to say. Yeah. Because we're moving on, we're still on PS2. Which is basically the era of the emulated port now. We're there now.

We're stopping doing straight ports. It's all on emulation now. Well, Taito decided in their wisdom, and I mean that sincerely, to release two, well, three, if you count, power up on the PSP, but I don't. Two Taito Legends compilations, which are based on Taito memories, the Japanese set. Now, 2005 or 2006, and the first one is loaded that with, I want to say 30-odd games. Yeah. And they play fine. got stuff like Space Gun, which is

a light gun game, so that doesn't really... Yeah, you don't have any light gun support, unfortunately, for any of the light gun games on this. But there are so many great games like Rainbow Islands, Rastan, you know, New Zealand's story, Operation Warfigan, another, you know, both I'm a big fan of Continental Circus, which is a really cool racing game. Yeah, no, good stuff. Yeah, just really, really...

And, you know, the usual were bubble-bubble, and the menus aren't super great, but the games all run fine. Yeah, yeah. They're all basically playable. But then Title It 2 comes along with it's, I want to say 50, odd games. It's ridiculous, isn't it? Yeah. This is an absolute insane collection. They mix

them up with, like, some of them are PS2 exclusive, some of them are Xbox exclusive. Yeah, yeah. I've got to say the Xbox got the better deal here by getting both Bubble Symphony and Kaddash and Rayforce. I... But then I think that the PS team might have got G. Darius. Yeah, this is it. I would argue against it because

I am such a G. Darius mark. It's ridiculous. I love that game. It's probably the best Schmop ever made, as far as I'm concerned. G. Darius. Yeah, I adore. it, man. I just... I mean, it's not as good as the game that it's an anagram of, but, you know, I kid. GDarius is great. The main problem I have with it is

I haven't learned all the mechanics checks and I know how to do, like, beam fight and stuff. If I knew how to do it, I'd be able to actually... Basically, it's as simple as, when you turn your captured ships into a laser, if you fire that laser into a pink laser from an enemy, you will get into

a duel, essentially. But you will always win, because your laser absorbs theirs, and it becomes enormous, as a result. It's just silly as all hell, but I love it. I just love the aesthetics of G. Darius. And the weirdest thing is G. Darius was a standalone PS1

game, and that's not that long ago. Absolutely, yeah. The main, now, there are so, I'm going to just, I've got a real lots of some games on this thing, because this is one of my favorite retro collections, despite being massively flawed. It's incredible. I mean, Bubble Symphony is incredible.

Both Darius games. Liquid Kids. I love Liquid Kids. Liquid kids is wicked. And Puzzle Boble 2, the best one. Yep. And one of my all-time favorite absolute peak arcade games, only in this, is Spacing Invaders 95. Oh, yeah.

I love that game. And it's only in this and every single time, like, hamster announcing a new arcade archives, I'm like, come on, Super Space Invaders 95, come on. Attack of the Looney Lulies, let's go. Yeah. And it's never happens. Yeah. But the issue with this is there's so much on here that, the, oh, I haven't even mentioned

elevator action returns being on here. Oh, yeah. Camelry, man. I love Camelry. What a game. Camelry, also known as On the Ball. Yeah, yeah. There are some games on here, and I want to say Metal Black is one of them. Yeah, Metal Black has an issue. They just don't work properly.

Yeah. There's one game where you can't use bombs. Like, you're not able to use them. They didn't map it to anything. Yeah. And it's like, how does this happen? Yeah, I know. I will take a flawed compilation like this just to get,

when I couldn't get these games, any other way back then. Of course, of course. I can buy Liquid Kids on Switch. I can emulate Liquid Kids now, but back then that was not an option. Yeah. Like, not for me.

So this is huge. But to put out a retrocompletion where some of the games just don't work as kind of messed up. Yeah, absolutely. Again, I can forgive it because, I mean, it was a budget release at the time. I probably spent no more than five pounds on it.

And, you know, it just gives you an enormous quantity of absolute bangers. Yeah. So it's difficult to get, like, hung up on things like oh you know metal black doesn't quite work correctly or whatever yeah um so yeah it's not the best to release a game like that um you know it is definitely not in its favor but at the same time there's so much good stuff on here that it's just like yeah you know i'll i'll take the hit why the hell not um if i can play this many good games and i love the

fact that it also it's one of the few games that introduces basically like a favorites list so you can essentially filter out what games you like to play the most and have them on its own dedicated list. A few retro combinations will do that down the line that we're going to look at. But now it's a really nice little feature that just yeah, cut the wheat from the chaff essentially and make your own list.

So 2002 brought us what is quite a hard sell to a lot of people even now in retrogaming, which is Atari VCS slash 2,600 games, and Activision Anthology has about 50 odd them. This thing probably changed the way that I think about retrogaming. Because I was a retrogaming even back in this era playing. these compilations, you know. Because as everyone on Retroats knows now, I was pretty much

raised by emulation inter because they didn't have anything else. The Activision Anthology was my first real exposure to a R.A.2600 games. Now, it wasn't my first exposure to these games because one day my uncle brought home from

some market this device called the TV boy. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, infamous. Which I now know contained lots of hooky, recolour renamed Atari VCS games. So the game known as Pitfall, one of most famous

Atari games ever, to me was known as Forest Walk. Okay. Well, you know, nice a lot of nose, that one, isn't it? Yeah, though I think, now that I say that, given that I had Pitfall

the mine adventure, I must have known it was Pitfall. So that's been written all my entire history just there. Everything's been thrown into disarray. So I must have been aware that these were of similar vintage to pitfall. I guess so, yeah. But Activision's, the thing is, with the VCS, lovely machine, you're very fond of the Atari 26th.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I have a big fondness for it. But yeah, as most people know, the games are very simplistic. You know, they're very much arcade ports a lot of the time, so they have that sort of a quarter-munching quality to them where it's just like one more go, one more go, we'll have another go. But, like, yeah, the actual game itself is very limited in what you can do. A good VCS game will always have, like, a nice addictive quality to it, where it's just like, I like that gameplay loop, I will continue to play this. And no developer and publisher was doing that better than Activision, basically, at the time.

Activision, to me, it kind of is the VCS. Like, when I want to play a VCS game, mostly, until recently, because of a. certain project that we'll talk about. Yeah, yeah. I was pretty much on these games because it gives a chop a command. Yeah. Holds up great. Frostby

I would play now. I love Frostby. I still play Hero and Keystone Capers. Like, they're just great games. Just a really solid hook, you know, that you just want to keep doing because it's such a nice time. I love. I love Mega Mania. I love Pluck. It's like I love River

Raid. Riverade is a banger. Yeah, I'm a Dioro as well. Really good little. Yeah, there's so many cool games on this thing. Now, the thing that makes it even cooler is back in the day, Activision would offer so on patches for your clothes or whatever. Yeah. If you were to send in like proof of certain high score thresholds.

Yeah. So this was literally, the early version of achievements was mailing a photograph. Yeah, of your high school. To Activision themselves, which they will then reply. And in a brilliant touch, just such a great touch, you can unlock those patches in this game by playing to the level and you would have to play.

Yeah, yeah. But also in reaching certain scores you'll unlock things like old Atari commercials which instantly are insane. Oh yeah. Yeah, no, they're incredible. The one for Megamania is just like permanently stuck in my head. Oh, with the band, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's so good. And that game is good too. Yeah, no, totally. No, it's an insanely cool collection. And like, if anything, it's one of the first times where we sort of see some sort like digital archiving happening here

instead of just a straight up retro compilation yeah you know the presentation is very much like no we want to do these games service

we want to present them in a way that that really puts them in that absolute highlight so you got this lovely bedroom aesthetic don't you yeah and they had to give it

the context with like the 80s music that you can listen to that's the other thing that's cracking about is you get like a selection of actual licensed 80s like pop hits

and that play on the radio in the bedroom and it's just like, oh, what a lovely thing. You've got like Twisted Sister, you've got like soft cell and stuff. It's it's really good stuff as well. You can even continue to play the games whilst the license songs play in the background.

It's just wicked stuff, man. It's a lovely piece of work. One of my favourite silly features is the fact that one of the filters makes it look like you've been smoking. Oh, yeah. You've got a smoke drifting over the screen because that's probably what you would have. Like the game's all laid out on that ridiculous rotating rack as well.

It's great for it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, if that thing exists, I want one, Godman. Yes, that's really great. And compilations were not even, like, done with the, uh, with the, uh, with the, with the, with the, with the, like, because Sega had once again gone. Okay, we've got Sonic out there and I need to get some other stuff, uh, on the go. Yeah, so we get the Mega Drive collection from 2006, right? Yeah, this was direct, this was backbone, I want to say.

Yes, it was. Criticised, but in my opinion, this was a fine collection. I think it's a great collection. In fact, I was happy with this. Why I'd like to highlight the PS2 one in particular is because, again, there's a little bit more of an element of they actually bothered to localise it correctly for the different regions. So this is a Mega Drive collection.

It says Mega Drive. It's not Genesis games. So, yeah, I just really appreciate that sort of thing. But some of the stuff included on these is ridiculous. I mean, the PSP one in particular... That's the best one for you. It gives you a bloody Congo-Bongo as an unlockable... Oh, a bit of Congo Bongo. I love that stuff, man.

But yeah, each version, the PS2 and PSP have are different unlockable games, so it's almost worth having both because there's some cool stuff in there. And the conditions are easier. Yes, absolutely. They're not ridiculous. A lot of the time it's just open one of the games and it will unlock something. Yeah. I think it's like Get A. K.S. Emerald is one of them.

It's something like the headshot, Get A.K.S. Absolutely. And that's completely doable. But, yeah, you get, the fantasies are two, three, and four on the compilation for the compilation for the first time. You get Golden Axe the entire trilogy. You get the absolute best Mega Drive game of all time. Game Ground! Yeah, Game Ground, mate.

Get it there. Finally, you're getting some Game Ground on Retronauts. Damn right, damn right. It's about time. There's not been a single good episode until now. Here we are. We've arrived at Game Ground. Yes, mate.

Damn right. Oh, I swore. It's all good. I don't even care. Game Ground, baby. Let's do it. But yeah. Yeah, Shadow Dancer.

Shinobi 3, really good stuff on this. Oh, I call it Gigi. That's my shorthand for Game Ground. Yeah, sorry, do go on, you go on. But yeah, just really great collections. You say Shadowdance, but that was not on my version. I'm pretty sure that was US version, only for some reason. Maybe it was.

Maybe there was a censorship issue there or something. The PSP version of that definitely didn't have Shadow Dancer, which is really unusual. Which is shame because it's genuinely a great game. Oh, yeah, totally, totally. But no, I mean, like, yeah, it's a really good compilation. A lovely way to get a load of Mega Ryo games at once. And also some really weird curios in the extras. And some lovely interviews with developers.

I just, yeah, like, again, it's one of those things where it goes above and beyond just to give you extras and additional, like, content and things outside of the video games that just help elevate the, like, the whole package. It's a real nice time. It's a strong one. The only other downers they would give it other than what I've already mentioned is they've got that crappy Megadry version of Virtual Fighter

on that. Yeah, they keep rolling that one out, don't they? Yeah, I'm always amazed that they bother. Yeah. But yeah, we should probably talk about the ultimate collection, though, because a lot of what that collection draws from

is the PS2 version. Man, you know how you can buy all of these Sega games separately on Steam? Yeah. I'd like to see the sales figures for that Virtual Fighter 2 port. I'd like to see the sales and I'd like to see the refunds because there is no way I cannot imagine that anyone would be like

I mean there's got to be a few people who grew up with it somehow they had they made the wrong choices and grew up with it I don't know anyway sorry sorry yes Megatron ultimate collection this was a PS3 and 360 I believe yeah so this is basically an enhanced version of the PS2 game with a bigger list of games you also get more unlockable games one of the Unlockable games is the original fantasy star

which basically gives you the entire franchise on one disc which is awesome you also get the arcade version of Shinobi you get Golden Axe Warrior which is a banger of a mass system game it's really good yeah you get all the Sonics although for some reason you can't combine Sonic 3 and Knuckles

which is a real dast I remember this because Backbone said it wasn't possible to do it and then someone did it and it's like changing two bites or something yeah daft as all help don't say it's not possible to the Sonic fan base because they will find a way

Kind of way, absolutely. And, of course, we get... You're getting, like, shining force and all the fantasy-style games up to that point, including the Mastas and one, as we mentioned. And they've included GameGround again. Exactly, very important. Gameground's there again. Good stuff.

One of my favourite games, E-Swat. Yep, yep. No, it's a really good collection. Beyond Oasis is an absolute, like, rarity as well. That's lovely to have that in there as well. Yeah, no, it's a great version. But once again, falls foul of the localisation issue. yes the title screen says megadrive ultimate collection

but all the artwork and all the references in the bonus menus and stuff is to Genesis instead of Megadrive so yeah it's just a bit of a shame that the overall package wasn't localized correctly for the region but again you can't really complain when you're getting this much content I guess and these won't be too expensive either the current Megadrive collection I think the one on the switch yeah yeah I think it's brilliant

but it doesn't have all of this Like, there's stuff, pretty sure there's stuff missing. Yeah, I mean, the current collection only has Mega Drive games on it, so no extra arcade stuff or mass system games. Yeah, none of those arcade games. And the thing I really don't like about it is that it has framescape issues, which is something that really

shouldn't be happening on a modern system. Even on, even if you play it on PS5, it still has frame skip issues, which is not hot. Really? Really. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. But that version does also crib the bedroom aesthetic that Atari, Activision Anthology did. So, you know, Sega, obviously.

So on the one hand, it's got some issues, but on the other hand, it's got alien soldier. True, there we go. Yeah, again, you have to, you know, fight your battles sometimes. Has it got game ground, though? That's my question. Oh, it must do. It must do now. It's important, and it's there.

Now we started with, um, Sega, and I want to kind of finish with it, if that's okay with you. Yeah, yeah. Because the Sega ages 2,500 series is a thing. Yes. And it started out as one thing. and ended up being something very different, which is interesting.

Like, Sega took stock of it and they kind of went, nah, this isn't working. Let's change it up. So, like, the earliest ones, or the earlier ones were released. Essentially, 3D remakes of games like Outrun, Golden Axe and Alien Syndrome.

Now, some of them were good, Alien Syndrome. Yep. Others, not so good. Yeah, Golden Axe. Gold Max is atrocious, yeah, God. The version of Bonanza Brothers was pretty good after.

but yeah no definitely that one's very much just an upscaling of the original visual so it doesn't lose too much but yeah we got a little compilation of these in the west um classic collection yeah which is it's an interesting little collection i have a lot of time for it i think there's some good stuff in here i dig it um yeah but um i like weird stuff absolutely this is the thing i still think it has probably one of the best virtual racing ports of all time on it oh yeah until the switch one came out yeah it was pretty much the one wasn't it this this one still has more content than the than the switch version. There's more tracks on it and stuff.

So it's a good time. It's a real good time to work. It's well worth checking out. I mean, I just think that getting what were individually released in Japan as like 10 separate games. Yeah. On one disc is a pretty good value proposition in general. It's a real shame that we didn't get Alien Syndrome in Powell territory, unfortunately. That really sucks because it's probably the best one.

Yeah. Like Alien Syndrome, that version, say it's ages 2,500 already 14. Yeah. Alien Syndrome, if you find a way to play it I'm pretty sure it's not on the Japanese PSN so buy a copy or emulate it and delete it within 24 hours Exactly

It's pretty much just like Kind of Contra Like it's got massive contra vibes It's really fun In a way that the later Wii game wasn't Oh god that Wii game is horrendous Yeah this is much more fun It's a lot more like the original arcade game

Except even more streamlined I really highly recommend it In fact, Sagan Classic collection, even though it reviewed very badly, if you're a Sega fan, you kind of have to get it. Yeah, no, I would recommend it. There's not too many stinkers, to be honest with you. Golden Axe is kind of really the outlier there. But, like, honestly, there's some really good stuff in here.

The Monarcho GP game is a lot of fun, really fast-paced and twitchy. The Fantasy Zone port is really good fun. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a good time. Like I say, that Virtue Racing Port, I think, is a real highlight as well. But obviously, yeah, the Sega Ages series kind of pivoted later on, didn't it, to be... It did. Yeah,

retro compilation theme thing Well, this is where the company M2 sort of came into sort of prominence, I think Because they were behind some of these things That back in the day When these came out, these were a big deal Like Gunstar Hero's Treasure Box Because at this time,

Treasure were just like retro gaming Like Jesus Yeah, exactly Like they were being treated like absolutely flawless Now we've moved away from that now I think But it was like, oh my God Dynamo Headie

Guns to Heroes, Alien Soldier. And, yeah, that's a great... That's a great package. Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's a real good time. Alien Soldier is a curate's egg, I think they call it. Okay. It's a quiet taste.

Yeah, I still haven't clicked with it. One day it'll happen, but it's still not quite happening for it. Alien Soldier is basically use reflect a lot, like use the double tap to reflect constantly to get more health. So you can use the Phoenix charge, whatever it's cool. failing that enemies that throw bombs can have them reflected back at them it's all about deflection and it's still really hard even if you know that

but it's actually even if you do know that it's actually possible to get past the first few levels because you cannot play it normally it's really difficult but that collection was an early like showcase for M2 because it was like okay here's alien soldiers here's down at my heady here's ghost of heroes but

we've gone up and beyond and we've included the Game Gear versions of these games yes absolutely if I remember correctly yeah you can, like, change the type of system the sound drivers running on. Yes, you can, yeah, which is kind of fun. But the even more impressive was, like, the Fantasy Zone and Monster World sets that included, like, everything. I mean, the Fantasy Zone one is insane. The lot of stuff it includes.

It's, like, all the arcade versions, the Mark III version, a version remade based on the NES version. Yeah. Because they couldn't include the NES version. Yeah, yeah. They also made a new, because Fantasy Zone 2 was originally just a master system or Mark3 game. Yeah, yeah. They re-made it. They made a system 16 version.

Yeah, yeah. It's really cool. It fits like a glove. It's like it was always there. Yeah, you can get that version on 3DS now as well. You can, and it's awesome. I think it's also somehow on the Switch, but I might be wrong on that.

In fact, it is definitely on the Switch. Now I think about it. It's part of their Sega Ages on the Switch, I believe. Okay, okay. But yeah, no, that is an incredibly extensive collection of Fantasy Zone games. Yeah. Like, well worth owning. Like the Game Gear game, the Megadrive game,

Glad it Protective some reason. Yeah, little spinoffs that have Opa RPG and them yeah, no, it's really good fun.

And the maze, obviously. Of course, of course. Yeah, the Pac-Man one when Opo is a Pac-Man. Yeah, yeah.

But, I mean, there are so many others like, there's just Sega Memorial selection with even older games. Yeah, very early,

the classic Congo Bongo. Yeah. Head-on, which is infamously built into a lot of Sega arcade boards as like an extra. Yeah.

So, yeah. Yeah, like, it's, that pivot at the end of the life of the Sega series is probably where you want to be if you want to explore some cool little compilations because they're all M2 developed

so yeah they are the peak I want to say a lot again a lot of these are on the PSM for PS3 absolutely you can just go and get them and I recommend you do the fantasy star complete collection you'd think would be unplayable but no the English versions are on there yeah they put them on there there are other remix of fantasy star which aren't in English

they knew you were going to import it so yeah so that kind of brings us around like there are others obviously we've skipped capcom classics reloaded and etc yeah i mean there's some there's some later you know like 360 stuff there's obviously that midway arcade origins collection um there's a there's a nice little capcom collection of xbLA stuff on 360 as well there's the midway arcade on origins as well yeah yeah that's surprisingly good in my opinion yeah yeah sorry i think i've got the title wrong when i was mentioning it before but yeah that's the one i'm yeah yeah sorry yeah yeah uh surprisingly good in my opinion and even you know Up until now, we get an Atari flashback collections on PS4 and stuff.

They're very nice little collections. Yeah, they've all been blown out of the water. Exactly, by Atari 50. Yeah, the anniversary celebration. God, what a compilation this is. It's the best compilation that's ever been made. It's close. It's definitely up there, right? Yeah, it's up there at the top.

Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, for me personally, I think I prefer a more condensed collection because I actually like to spend time with games. when I've got something like this where it's just an enormous list of games things fall by the wayside unfortunately and it doesn't get my time so that's the one... It's the best presentation

Yeah, the one criticism is basically that for me personally. There's just a little bit too much on here. Oh my one criticism is there's no Activision but then how could there be? Yeah, well this is it it's an Atari collection right? But oh my God the presentation is incredible the timeline is gorgeous

I love the idea of basically making a virtual museum and you know you explore it like you would at a museum display and it's just incredible this amount of stuff that's in here interviews concept art box art that you can actually view in 3D

just quotes from developers and things just a big and new games as well they've added in for brand new games which are actually like up there as like just you know they they work well alongside their games that they're sitting against I mean vector sector is just so good

oh what a great time just like fusing all the vector stuff into one massive adventure like that's so cool and the take the new take on combat which i forget the name of is stunning absolutely i mean like yeah that that's a game that needs a refresh to be honest with you but like yeah it's a great version of it like honestly why play combat when you play that now um yeah there's some incredible stuff in here there's bonus games as well in there that have some insane um like um that what you have to do to get them is a bit strange but like um yeah we we cover we go over that a bit in the interview good stuff i believe uh because we i spoke to additional clips and yeah got Chris

Connor and Mike Mika lovely stuff got some very enjoyable interview content i think so i'm going to uh rudely wind this down now yeah yeah i think this is a good place to end it Okay, you've heard me and Lewis babbling on about compilations for a fair while now, so I think it's time for something more sort of informative at this point. and hopefully also interesting because I'm talking to a couple of fine people from Digital Eclipse

Would you mind introducing yourselves, please? Probably in alphabetical order, I think. By first name or last name. I guess it's me either way. Hi, I'm Chris Kohler. I'm editorial director at Digital Eclipse. And then also I'm Mike Micah, President of Digital Eclipse. This is all very exciting. Now, I'm not going to lie to you. I'm unashamedly kind of a digital

eclipse fanboy now, as I've been very excited about what you're doing with compilations because correct me if I'm wrong on this. I feel like the first of the kind of contemporary digital eclipse compilations was the Mega Man legacy collection in terms of

what it was offering. That's what sort of established. I don't like to call it a template because it has kind of evolved from that, I think, but you had your games, you had your supplemental material, extremely high resolution scans of supplemental material. But incident, incidentally,

I bought on eBay Williams Arcade Classics for Mega Drive recently and that was Digital Eclipse as well apparently so there is quite a long lineage coming along there but I guess the first thing I want to ask is with these compilations we've got say Disney

Classic Games collection, Disney Afternoon Collection, the Samurai Showdown Neo Geo collection, a Blizzard Arcade collection that's just to name four of them but how do these sort of come together or is the first step like someone just thinks oh hey that would be a cool thing to have and then sort of pitchers to whoever owns this stuff.

Or how does it work exactly? It's a little bit of both. I'd say going back to the Mega Man collection, legacy collection, that was kind of like a calling card for what we decided the company would push for it and try to build, like you said, a template. We wanted to build something that was kind of like that calling card for these companies. So once that came out, we started to get a lot of calls from other companies who had IP or latent IP or been thinking about doing some sort of collections.

and they were basically requesting we want something like you did with Mega Man for our games. And we've also been going out and trying to do what we call like our dream or a bucket list of game collections and remasters and stuff that we want to do. And so simultaneously while we're getting these calls coming in

with some really interesting opportunities, you think of like SNK or Disney, those kind of things. We also have been going out and knocking on doors trying to get our hands on the things that we think are really important and that kind of come from a place of where does it have a story in the history of games that we can tell, essentially,

because we treat these things kind of like a documentary. Yeah, that was interesting about the bucket list, what you said, because I was going to mention that there are things that you've been bringing out, for example, the Cowabunga Collection, that a lot of people would say, if you could sort of say, what's your dream game compilation,

they'd say Turtles Games, you know. It's a sort of thing that seemed so far beyond what was possible to have. And, you know, now it's out there. Same with the Disney Afternoon Collection. never thought it would happen. They were just like, yeah, those games were great. Everyone loves them. They're not getting re-released because they're licensed games, but, you know, ho-hum, here we are.

It's happened. But I've got to ask now, with the sort of, going from the sort of museum perspective and talking about the extras here, because I feel like those in some ways are the main event when it comes to presenting these games, because, okay, I hate saying this, because it sounds like I'm advocating, but you can play these games. in other ways that, you know, I won't mention. So what becomes important, I think, is contextualizing the games and presenting them with interesting extras to make people value them.

And it's not just like, here's artwork, here's, save, rewind, et cetera. All that stuff is welcome. But with Atari 50, it's actual context. It's here is a game that you might play for five seconds go, I'm not playing this ever again, you know, and move on. now it's, now I see how this was the stepping stone to this, to this, you know, that's a fantastic approach. So for me, it feels a bit like a sort of culmination of what you've done before. Sorry, I'm talking way too much for what's supposed to be an interview.

Yes. And what's the question? Okay, I'll go. I'll go back a little bit. No, I mean, that's an excellent encapsulation of our feeling. It really was. It really was. I'll go back a bit because the Disney Classic Games collection, which came out, I want to say 2018, 19. That included something that blew my mind,

which was Aladdin in the Final Cup, because that doesn't happen. That was a Disney's Mega Drive Aladdin game, which many people consider the best one. They might be misguided on that. But anyway, moving on.

The Final Cup was a couple. Actually, why don't you tell us what the Final Cut wasn't and how that came about? Because that really is a fantastic thing to include in a competition. Yeah, I mean, that really, the first,

of that was Frank Sefaldi and the Video Game History Foundation had found or had been given source code to Aladdin. And going through that source code, we discovered that there was much more in the game that was intended to be in there. It was stuff that was just turned off or just was almost finished. And so digging into that, we had our engineer, Rich Whitehouse, who's a genius, kind of go through and make sure that this thing could be compiled and could we reinstate some of these aspects of the game? And the final cut that we have

out there, I would say, is the near final cut, because there's even more stuff that we would have liked to have put in, but there's like cultural sensitivities and other things that we have to be careful about, that we weren't sure would be something that we should put out there or not, or whatever, because it's a different world than the 90s or whatever.

So with that in mind, there was this article that the Big Game History Foundation had put out about it, and Rich had written the article and talked about what was all in there. And that was like a light going off because we're like, this should actually be kind of like the cornerstone to a project that we would do. This is the kind of stuff we want to put into projects. So we approached Disney with the idea and Nighthawk and said, this is what we want to do. And it was kind of funny because it's hard to pitch something like this when it hasn't been done very often before. And so

people didn't understand what the value of it would be. In fact, like, I think on Gog, like Aladdin had maybe sold. It's been there for a long time. That and Lincoln collectively maybe sold like 5,000 units or something when you do the math. And it's just like, people thought we were crazy. But our thesis was that people would like to see this final version. And with all the context that we like to do, we're going to go out and try to find everything we possibly could about these games, but it together because these games were a big part of people's lives.

And they're very interesting people. And the story of the games was even more interesting. Because over the years, you'd hear stories about the Lion King breakfast that Disney had at like E3 or CES or whatever it was and all these things. So it's like, what if we just pull all those, all that context, pull it together, tell that story, introduce the final cut of Aladdin, and then interview the team members and all stuff. So it was hitting every pillar of what we were setting out to do.

So it was that in hand, and Nighthawk and Disney, who after kind of hearing what we thought was a terrible pitch, really got it and said, you know what? This actually does sound great. And put the full force of their companies behind it, too. So we collectively pulled this thing together. And all the while, just thinking like, let's just see if there's enough people out there.

And sure not, I mean, it did great and it did really well. When that's, sorry. The operative words, the operative words here is source code, right? Because like, you kind of have to have that if you're good, because this is not a ROM hack. This is like literally, you know, going back in and then recompiling. And, I mean, having source code also was what enabled us to do what we did with Blizzard Arcade collection, which is, you know, that didn't really get as much like attention and traction as some other games like Calabunga Collection did.

But it's like, these are engineers. Mike included, you know, were able to, because Blizzard had source for Lost Vikings and Blackthorn and Rock and Roll Racing, we're able to go in and do things like, oh, presenting the games in widescreen and adding Super Metroid-style map functionality to Blackthorn and stuff like that. And that's not something, that's not something we can do without that innate understanding, essentially, of like, what exactly is going on in any given time within the software. Yeah, and following that final cut thought was like, because I personally was on Rock and World Racing.

I was able to put the Genesis and Super Nintendo tracks together in one game and put in the CD audio of the actual music and then also introduced a four-player mode all because we've had source code. Yeah. There was a really fun time, though, for a good week there when people kept talking about rock and roll racing on Genesis has extra tracks and people can say extra tracks and like half people were talking about musical tracks and the other half people were talking about race tracks.

And it took us a while before, before we, We put it all in. We put it all in. It just took us a while before we realized we were talking about two different things. Yeah. The pipe dream for me with that collection was, which you did, was to put the extra levels of Lost Vikings in with the sort of Super Nintendo controls. And that can't have been easy. It's the kind of thing where I said, I'd say like, oh, that would be a nice thing to happen.

It will never happen. But now it now it just happened. So now I just, unfortunately, you've made it so that I just assume you're going to always do the things that I want you to do. And so far you have. So, you know. It's hard. But, like, now we have that bar we have to get all the time. I mean, nobody going to take my car.

I can't race into the ground. I mean, did you ever feel like, I mean, did you ever feel like, I mean, did you ever feel like, I mean, I saw a review. A review of the Blizzard Arcade collection that said something along the lines of too much sundry content distracts from the stuff that's worth playing. And I just thought, I don't know the stupidest things I've ever heard on one hand, but on the other, I mean, do you ever feel like the effort that's going into these isn't quite getting appreciated enough? Yeah, a little bit. Sometimes it's the audience, we said years ago that this wasn't going to, I think Frank said it, this wasn't going to be an overnight success story. It's not, sorry, it's under condemnation of the audience. It's more just like, you know, sorry, I just want to make that clear of it.

Yeah, it's not, yeah. No, absolutely. But, like, the thing is we figured if we do enough of these, people start to appreciate what these things mean and the value of them. And I think we went from nobody even knowing who we were, like, six years ago to you hear a lot of like, I hope digital clips is doing this or I hope it's, they almost use this like an adjective sometimes. And I think it's only because they started to learn, like our audience started to understand the value of all this context. And we've had a few people now, and some reviews start off where the collection is fantastic. I've been playing it or I've been in it for like, you know, four hours and I haven't even touched a game yet. And it's like, that's amazing.

That means like we're starting to get the validation. Yeah. And that kind of fed into what we wanted to do with Atari 50, which is we've always felt that the, you know, like the museum is the game. The bonus content is the game. And so it's like, well, how do we really do that? How do we actually take that stuff and get it out of the, you know, the museum? the sort of the sidelines or the marginalia of the options menu or the bonus content menu and actually like integrate that into the player experience.

And how do we trust that players are going to respond to that? Because it's like it's kind of a risk because what if most people actually don't bother with any of that stuff and they just want to play the games and they've never even thought about it. So it's really like Atari, you know, having to, you know, make sure that like Atari, was on board with this as well. It's just this idea that, like, no, we actually think people that are playing this are actually like, you know, they really want all of this content. So let's like integrate this all into like one experience. Yeah, and I hope it's like a, like a really good documentary. Like, I don't know how many people thought Helvetica would be a great story to tell about the creation of Helvetica. But like, I've seen the documentary three times now.

So it's one of those things where it's like, if we do it right, we can, we can kind of excite people about this sort of thing. Yeah. On a sort of similar note, With, for example, Disney classics again, the inclusion of, because I've seen a criticism of, like, the inclusion of, say, like, Game Boy Aladdin, Game Boy Lion King, because, like, it's fair to say that when you compare them to the console versions, they are, you know, broadly speaking, they're less feature packed. They're less air quotes good than the home console ones. But they're always there as an option. I just wonder if there's ever any kind of inclination or sort of pressure to not include them or just to stick with what, you know, the again, air quotes, sort of superior versions of the games. Yeah, you know, that does happen, but I think we look at this from various angles,

I'm sure Chris has some opinions on this too, where there's the completionist thing of like, see every version of this thing, because we're telling the story of a series of games. There's also the personal connection people have with various versions of the games. Some people only played the Game Boy version, and that sort of thing.

So you want to also do that. But then there's the educational side of it that I'm always fascinated with is like, what was the, what are the difference between and what sacrifices had to be made for the portable games or other versions of games. Like, for instance, we have Food Fight in the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection. And we have the arcade game.

We have the Atari 800 version of the game. We could have included the Atari 7800 version, which is very close to the arcade game. But we felt it was a stronger thing to demonstrate how the home port of the food fight, how different it was and the challenges it had. And so from that perspective, it's interesting to see that. And I think there's something there as part of the story. If you think of like Pac-Man, if we could have put Pac-Man in the way. there. Yes, the difference between Arcade Pac-Man and Atari Pac-Man. It's been great. And to talk about with Food Fight for the XE line, because again, if we were to sort of take all these games and just

put them into a list, you know, you'd see, oh, Food Fight for the computer, sure. But it actually, it really wasn't released technically for the computers. It was released for the Atari XE game system that came out in the late 80s. And so that gives us that opportunity to talk about that and to say, oh, this was a game that was only released for this sort of reconfigure. of the Atari computer platform weirdly and oddly into this game system. And so from a historical context standpoint, it's actually really important to put that there and that also talk about like, well, what was it actually? And then it's a weird thing to say, but like the actual experience of then going in

and playing that game can almost become even a secondary reason for having it in there in the first place. It's there as a historical artifact to help tell the story of Atari. If we did, if Disney Classic Games Collection didn't exist and we were, we were starting it like today from scratch, it would be a very different project proposal. I can, I can tell you that. And it would be, it would be like, yes, of course we got to put these Game Boy games in there, but let's do more, you know, to show people like this was the process. This is, this is how people had to take this console game and translate it into a portable game. Let's talk about the fact that for some people, their parents didn't allow them to own game consoles, but they didn't count the game.

Game Boy is being a game console, so they put a thousand hours into Aladdin on the Game Boy. And we talk about it that way. And then again, the hope is when people get that context, they're like, oh, that's cool. Let me check this out. And then when they start playing it, they're like, oh, yeah, they're right. Yeah, it's interesting how they kind of took this element and did it that way. Huh, this game is pretty neat. And so instead of bonus thing, no one will ever play, it becomes something that people actually like can appreciate and get into.

Yeah, I think that's kind of like what we do all. the time with these is like, how do we get people to appreciate everything we have in here? Yep. Of course, I mean, all the British kids would be sitting there going, where's, where's the master system, Aladdin? Why is that not in here? Yeah.

But, you know, something's got to give, I guess. Although, I have to say, of course, patching in, sorry, I think DLC for the Jungle Book Games plus Snezz Aladdin, I have to ask how that got wrangled, because obviously I'd have thought it would have been included initially if it was

possible then, but I don't know. what happened to make that possible? I'd say the hardest thing about everything we do outside of, like, obviously there's a lot of, you know, hard work that goes into these productions, but I think, like, the more challenging thing that we don't just control by hard work is licensing and cooperation of IP holders. And so when we do these things, a lot of people own various aspects of these games, and that might not get done in time for what we need to do.

We can't be beyond these things. We may be negotiating from day one and still never get to a resolution on some of the stuff we want to include. We've even had situations where we've included things and we find out the day before we ship that there's rights problems. We have to pull them out and do an update. And all these things like,

this stuff just happens all the time. And with the Disney collection, I think it did a few things. We proved that it was a viable product that could sell well. And then also there were the negotiations that were going on that just never came to conclusion by time it shipped

that were able to come together as well. And so doing that kind of follow on, that's more of a complete version of that was something we wanted from the very beginning, everybody wanted from the very beginning, but it took that time to get there. And because it did well, it proved that we could do it. And again, as you said,

it's like that first whack at, you know, the Disney, the Aladdin and Lion King, that was being done when it was kind of like, you think these are going to sell? People are going to buy this? And so, but now it's like doing that update. It's like we've now proven that people are actually going to buy it. And so it makes more sense to go and start paying money licensing,

essentially something like Capcom for the Capcom version of Aladdin, which again, like I'm super excited. excited to have in there. I really like that. It's great. It's the same for me with the inclusion of the second lost Vikings game in the Blizzard collection, which came out about, I want to say, a few weeks after it launched.

So that was really exciting, I thought. Nice to, that it was, you know, because you could just have not done that, you know? You could have just not put Snezaladin in. You could have just not put Jungle Book in. We would probably be much more profitable if we didn't do these things, but we also wouldn't live with ourselves if we didn't. Yeah, you

even be able to sleep at night. Exactly. It's all the long game. It's all the long game. Eventually it's going to come back and benefit us. It hasn't happened yet, but, you know, eventually. We'll get there. We hope so.

Talking of Atari 50, I think I found it interesting. Now, just to explain briefly, even though people by now will know that the timeline aspect of Atari 50 is a presentation of the sort of Atari timeline with contextual video clips, trivia, and artwork and, you know, playable games and sort of other sort of errata. what I thought was quite interesting about it and very rare in a product like this is it didn't really shy away from some of sort of Atari's missteps and made mistakes which has it's kind of almost sort of a warts and all kind of feel because games like Cybermorph,

the Jaguar title Cybermorph, and that's not even getting into Jaguar being on there at all, but we'll get to that. I mean, the only reason, not the only reason, but the primary reason I would say that's a known at all is because of a very funny, angry video game, nerd video at trashing it. I wonder, again, if there was ever any kind of suggestion maybe don't, that you don't include that stuff and you just focus on the sort of the positive aspects.

But then it wouldn't, I suppose it wouldn't be true, would it? Well, I was a small, I'll go ahead, Chris. Well, I was going to say, I mean, so Atari, like, you know, today's Atari was very amenable to the idea of like, yeah, we're going to talk about like, you know, mistakes in the clash of corporate cultures and stuff like that because, I mean, they're so far removed from it. They're not offended by that at all, you know, so they actually thought that, you know, having that. that conflict in there would actually help this to stand out. I mean, one of the things that Atari in particular was like they realized there are already Atari collections out there, you know, on modern platforms that you can go by this. This had to be something different.

And so that was a way of differentiating it. And it's done, it's not done in a way where we sort of like point and laugh at ET or something like that. You know what I mean? It's all done with a human angle. We understand the decisions that went into it. You know, the video interviews are constructed in a certain way. so that you, you understand, you know, sort of the, the, the mistakes that were made.

And it's, it's done in a, in a, a, a sympathetic sort of a way. And as far as there was, I remember there was a little bit of a pushback. You were trying to pick out Jaguar games. And I'm like, oh, club drive, club drive. And somebody from Atari was like, oh, that, that reviewed really poorly back in the day. And I'm like, doesn't matter. Like, it's like that, that's like the least of my concerns at this point. It's like, it's, because again, it's about that, like,

the historical importance of it and just the fact that it's like club drive it's like it was i never want to say the first anything but it was like an open world you know an open world but you know it a game where you can kind of drive anywhere you want fully constructed out of polygons you know it is a fascinating historical artifact today to go back and look at for sure and so i'm so glad we have it in there then you know then it turns out again there's there's club drive fans out there's drive heads you know who just love this game and so like we're happy to give that to them as well. And on top of that, like, it's kind of our approach now whenever we begin discussions

with any partner on these sorts of things where we say at the front of the very get-go, and you can hear me talk about documentaries all the time on this thing. But like, we approach it with this very objective documentarian kind of viewpoint where it doesn't, it isn't about putting in a good light or a bad light. It's about just telling the objective story of it and like finding out what that narrative is and then going all in on that. So if there's bad moments, good moments, I think it's, we want to be impartial to that. So we're not trying to, like, pump up a company's value of these games, not trying to do

whatever. If that's a side effect, great. But ultimately, we want to do is give all that, we've used this word so many times as well, like all that context to somebody who's never experienced this stuff before. So we have a lot of people who have never really played Atari Jaguar, even Atari home computers or Atari 7800 or, and now even more people interested who've never even played a 2600 collection, which bog was in my mind coming in. because they kind of want to go on this journey of 50 years for Atari,

not necessarily because of the games in particular. And you mentioned, you know, the angry video game nerd. And it's also like, yeah, you know, so many games. So, I mean, the Jaguar is certainly one, you know, certainly are or Ninja Turtles won on the NES, you know, it becomes a meme and it becomes nothing else. And so with Nich turtles won, you can always go back, get an emulator, play it and experience it for yourself. But again, like, you know, with Calabunga Collection, it was like, what can we do to kind

of rehabilitate this game's, uh, you know, this, the Ninja Turtles 1 is a, uh, really good game with the difficulty cranked up too high, you know? And so it's like, yeah, so it's just like give people the tools, rewind, rewind, it just makes that game brilliant because like what happens in Turtles 1 is that like, you're just going along and everything is actually fine. And then suddenly the game kind of like assaults you with like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, ban, ban, ban. I'm sorry, captured. And so, but, but just to be able to just say, okay, hold up, let me just rewind five seconds back to when I had full health, let me try that again.

It just makes it so much more pleasant to play through and then experience what was actually, you know, good about that design. This is not to say that it's not, I mean, everybody got frustrated with this game, you know, and sort of like watching the angry video game nerd video is very cathartic to the shared experience that we had. But for us, it's like, how do we rehab the game? And so Jaguar is another example because even if you wanted to just go on the internet and try to find some Jaguar ROMs in an emulator and emulate them, you basically couldn't because the

state of Atari Jaguar emulation was such that it was sort of patchy and piecemeal and nothing really worked that well. Now we have this internal coded from scratch Jaguar emulator, and now you can actually, people have not, people again, they know Jaguar, the meme of the Jaguar, they do not actually, they have not played the games because unless you want to spend $500 on an Atari Jaguar and start buying actual cartridges for like obscene prices, you cannot actually experience the Jaguar. And so now we're actually letting people do that. And you can get that hands-on experience for yourself and discover, quite frankly, I think

that the Jaguar, it, you know, was more than, you know, than the reputation that it has now. Yeah. And another thing I had learned along these lines a few years back now is I had helped out and was participate in this documentary called Atari Game Over. And when it started, when it first came across the email and I got invited to participate in this thing, it was intended to be a mockumentary. Like, they weren't planning on doing a real documentary on the ET burial site. And it was only after like a few weeks of more people coming on board that the real story started to kind of come through about Howard's struggle to get that game out, what really happened at Atari, that ultimately it moved from being some that pokes fun at ET, which was already done by Angry Video Game Nerd and everything anyway, to this really...

like sympathetic and character-driven story about Howard Scott Warshaw and a redemption arc came out of it. And so the result of that ended up being a lot of people's interest in ET wasn't like because it was a terrible game. And the documentary proved it, no. It's still a bad game. But that new perspective around ET resulted in like the prices of the game going up. It's harder to find.

People wanted to have it. People wanted to experience it. People were going to try out ET because of the stuff. story behind it. And that was something that just, after that, seeing that effect is something I feel like we should be like pushing more for us. Like, tell that again, coming back to context. But putting that all in there is super valuable and exciting for people. I think people are really interested in that. And it makes the games more interesting to play. And also with E.T, when you see the problem, I mean, I think a lot of the problem with E.T. You not to get into,

you know, this, but it's not, it's not in the collection. But, you know, ET, kids, they get it for Christmas and they ripped the wrapper off and then they rip the box in half and they rip the manual at half and they throw it all in the garbage and they put the game in and they're like okay here we go it's ET and then they have no way to do um and so if but if you the thing is ET not only they they knew that ET was like too complicated because they included not only an instruction manual with ET been like a fold out sheet yeah had even more tips that weren't in the instruction manual and it's like if for your first game of ET you know set the settings to these settings so it's the easiest mode and then you can you can understand

how to play ET. And when you do that, when you go in with an open mind and you RTFM and you actually like play the game like as the manual tells you to and you understand how it plays, is it, is it a great game? No, but is it like a completely incomprehensible game? No, because, but you have to like read that. And so that's, again, that's like why we always make sure, you know, to include the information that you were going to need. We don't just dump you with an Atari 2,600 ROM and say, figure it out. You know, we give you, we don't make sure you have that manual, like, to hand because you need it. I mean, in some instances, we even have helpers that show up on screen while you play these games now. We don't even have to go to the manual, but make sure you have the information you need to continue to play it correctly.

Star Raiders, right? Yeah, Star Raiders is a good example. You should talk about that because I think that's something we haven't really talked about. about a lot. Well, yeah. So Star Raiders in the Atari 50th, the I'd say the killer app for the Atari 800 and then ultimately the best version of the Atari 5200 version with Analog.

We were including that, but one of the challenges in previous collections and just historically has been that exact thing that Chris described, if you don't have the manual, you have no idea how to play the game. There was just no way to just start that game and know what to do. Not only that, it had keyboard control functions and all stuff

that don't really map well to a controller. So when we were putting Star in here, you realize this is such an important game that no one will touch because it's impossible to figure out. So we should include the original, but we should also do a number of quality of life things to make this a very understandable game. So we went, we basically hacked the game, went through the source, rewrote aspects of the game to make sure that it plays well on a controller, but also gave you the ability to have all the information you needed to have because the game required you to kind of keep mentally track of how many enemies are in

the sector that I'm in and how many what's damaged like what's my damage state on things so we create this bezel around the game that gives you all those indicators that are active and live indicators we also uh offer an overclock mode because the game is really slow back in the day it was very forgiving but now it was really hard for for our testers or our teenage testers always call them uh to really comprehend like why is it so slow it's this game is so slow so we made it so you can lock in like 30 friends a second it just stays consistent we've added additional audio, we put rumble support in, we put all these things in. And when you go to like the galactic map, it tells you what you need to do and how to do it rather than having

to go back to the manual to do that. So we walk you through the, I'd say the brilliance of this game. And we don't necessarily change anything in the game. We change the interface to make it feel more like it felt for somebody playing the game for the first time back in the day when everything outside of Star is even more complicated. So Star Raiders was an easy thing to understand back then because like it was a miracle that all this stuff was coming together. But hindsight, it doesn't work for people today. So we're able to go and kind of recreate that first impression and also make the game more accessible to people.

And since then, it was amazing to watch our testers go from, I don't know what I'm doing, to trying to get the best ranking in the game and competing. And it was just awesome to see that. I think that accessibility and, as Chris mentioned, Rewind, for example, is important, if only to... And I'm trying to think of a good way to describe this. It helps to give those games sort of more, again, context and value, because they seem to be a period. and it's sort of ongoing where old video games aren't perceived to have any value because you can just download them.

But now here, of course, you've got sort of quality and quantities. You've got something like, I want to say 100 or so games in Atari 50. There's a lot in there. But none of those games are just slapped on the, like, here you go, go nuts, as you've talked about. It's all presented in not only historical context, but, you know, with the manual. So actual contexts as well. And I think that's something to appreciate. Obviously, when I think of the VCS, the 2600, I do think of Activision.

And they are acknowledged in the museum. And I wondered if there was any sort of effort made to include any of the Activision games at all, or if that just wasn't the focus this time. We were really focused on Atari-owned properties. But that didn't mean that we didn't want. Like, I think Atari and ourselves would have loved to included those. I think you also look at this moment in time with Activision. I don't think it would, I would, without saying too much, as you say, it probably would have been very difficult had we pursued it to try to include it this time around and this.

Like, that doesn't, you know, mean that we can't talk to Activision later and try to do something or whatever, but it would have been amazing to Clinton. That's why we at least make mention in the timeline about it. but it was just not going to be in the cards for this, just go around. It makes me say, again, a lot of things. Oh, yeah, no, no. So a lot of the stuff we did in the timeline, as you may have noticed, is like, well,

why can't we mention Activision? We can mention Activision, right? Like, we can put an Activision game in here, but, like, we can talk about it. I mean, it's part of the story. So let's, let's just talk about it. Let's take a photograph of some titles of some games and, and do it that way. Just because, again, you can't like,

you can't understand the arc of Atari and what happened without also understanding that, you know, what was going on internally at Atari caused a whole bunch of people to quit. I mean, it is, it is a story about labor. It's a story about, you know, management versus labor and, you know, money versus art and all this kind of stuff comes into it.

And it's the story that is going to resonate with people in, in today's world because it's a lot of the same struggles. And so it's like, And again, we can't do it all in a video game. Like there's there's only so much text on a screen somebody will sit there and read. You know, it has to be, the timelines really had to be artifact focused. There are some boxes that are just text just to get us through that kind of part in the story. But like, we really tried to write it very short, make it very compact because nobody's going to sit there and just scroll through paragraphs and paragraphs of text.

And so we can't cover everything, but I think it would be fun if people were like, oh, I got the bare bones or I got the skeleton of this story from playing Atari 50, and now I'm reading Atari history books because I want to fill in all the gaps and get everything. If we want to learn more about Atari, go visit your local library. Yep. Now, as well as the sort of various different Atari systems, you've got, I want to say six new games. in there or reimagining of games such as there's a new version of haunted house there's near breakout, there's vector sector, there was

another combat like game the name temporarily escapes me. Now I've got to ask how those all came about because I had a lot of fun with those as well. That's another one of those discussions we've been having for a while of basically what could we do to kind of

celebrate or explore more of a brand identity and one of the things that we love to do because we love making games, but it's like, it's one thing to port games over enhance games, but it's also great to kind of wear the shoes of the people who preceded us and try to understand the difficulties and somebody. It's kind of its own kind of education for us and for those who are playing these games. So we were playing all the idea of what would it be like if we could do some sort of mashups or improvements over

some of the games that we enjoy that we grew up with that were important to us? What would that look like? And I think that's kind of where it came from. It was more or less like a meeting of like, who wants to work on what? And so everybody who was working on these games, myself included with Quadrantank is the name that escape you. Right. Yeah, sorry. No problem.

That was my game. How dare you? No. So we just want to do things that we loved. And so like with Quadrantank, I wanted to just capture the amount of fun I had with my friends playing combat. I felt like I was always the, or my friends and I were always the outliers because like we liked combat.

It was multiplayer and we did tournaments and all stuff. And that kind of moved into doing stuff with like playing Bomberman the same. way and playing all those other multiplayer games, it became like part of my career where I kept working on multiplayer games and enjoying that aspect of it. Jeremy Williams, who did VectorSector, a huge fan of Vector Games that became his call to arms. And then we had Dave Rees, who was a huge fan of Houses and Jason Sorillo, who is probably the biggest breakout fan I've ever met. And it's an air world being something that we knew, if you're going into 50 years of Atari, it felt like that had to be part of this because it's an, you know, it's an unfinished

quest and so many people fantasized what that fourth game would have been like. And so we also wanted to deliver that. And so Dave Reese, who did our 100 Houses game, jumped on top of that, too. So it was really just our way of, it's our love letters to the creators of these games and these genres that were like Atari. And that's kind of how it came together. Like Jason loved, which touch me, the little handheld touch me. Yeah, yeah. And so he's like, I'm going to put it in the collection because nobody's done it and so he went for it and so we didn't want to hold back on that we also had timelines we had to hit so we kind of we reduced the scope of the things we want to do you can imagine we probably said let's do like 50 of these things or whatever but so what's in there

was just what we could we could also deliver in the time but we felt that we could do at least a competent enough job or at least a nice homage to those games yeah well i thought when i played quadrotank i was because i only played it myself so far i did find myself thinking i'm going to need to get this on next time I get together with some people. It seems like it would be a love. I love the twin stick controls. I think they're absolutely great. You know how many people hated that. It was so funny in testing. People are like, this is the worst controls of ever. I'm like, this is the real tank controls. You do have the alternate controls. You can play it like combat. You can play. Yeah, yeah. You can. But like I love the tank controls. Yeah, I just want to stick with those to like

to get used to them because they're just so fun. With vector sector, I got to say, I was just when the sort of the blurb screen for it says it's a take on um um lunar lander and um asteroids and then i kept playing it and it's like oh no no this is major havoc now oh now it's tempest like that was enormous fun just i mean that's where i lost on my lives on tempest so i don't know if it then becomes something else but i'll keep i'll keep plugging away at it um thank you on a personal level thank you for putting major havoc in this because that's my favorite that's all that's one i've over the years the last probably like during the pandemic particularly when we're talking about doing this or it's like

that. Like I fell so in love with major havoc. I always liked it. But the thing that we wanted to solve was the controls because like it is so hard to control. I had that, you know, horizontal spinner. So so much time and effort went into to make sure that felt right. And putting in at least some more options of that, but also visually and the audio, we want to make sure we're really dead on. So there's a lot of effort put into making that be fully represented. We even had Owen Rubin come in who worked on the original and kind of give us some pointers on where we were. on some aspects of the game to make sure it was just as tight as it could be. And I love that game so much.

That's the one I probably played the most on the collection right now, outside of vector sector, which I love. I think that was when I discovered on some old Atari compilation, one of the ones that was like, I think it was like 80 games in one. I think you might have worked on that, actually, back in the day. But that had major havoc on there, I believe, and it was just a moment of like, well, I've never heard of this. How good can it be?

And then getting into it for like three hours. One thing I appreciated again is, and this is something that only recently seen, seems to have been realized by said sort of compilations, is you've got the kind of phosphorescence of the glow of the vectors quite well done. Because a lot of times I'd play asteroids on a compilation, it would just be the plain vector lines. And you're like, why would anyone want to look at this?

And then when I played it on an actual asteroid's like cocktail cabinet a few years ago, I was like, oh, I see, because it's the gorgeous, glowing, flashing, like, beautiful lights. That's what's so cool about the vectors. and you don't get that, you didn't used to get that without having an actual hardware. And now that is actually being emulated to an extent, which I think is great. We always found vectors mesmerizing. Like they just, they look just so different from everything else. And so we spent a lot of time, Jeremy Williams, who did Vector Sector,

he basically explored how to get the vectors look right with that game and then adapted that over to the other games. And also having Owen Rubin and others from Atari come in and discuss what the natural state of what they expected from vectors to look like and what they did, the tricks they had done to draw things on screen and having that realization that those tricks weren't accurately being represented in the game.

So we had to like kind of go back to the well several times to figure out like, how do we get those perfectly represented? Like the random color effects in Major Havoc are very particular and there's a distribution of those colors that make the things look like they do in the arcades. We had to do that. And then if you look at

something like Asteroys Deluxe, late in the game we realized like the parallaxed cardboard that the screen would reflect over wasn't really being captured either. So we scanned and separated all the layers of the asteroid effect, like the dressing, and we put a subtle parallax effect on there like you would have at the arcade, and we tracked the asteroid ship as it moves across the screen to use that as your perspective to move the parallaxing a bit so that there's some movement aligned to something that's going on on screen.

And it's so subtle, and most people don't even pick it up, but for those who know, they really know, and we've already got some response from people thinking, like, That was a great effect to include. That is pretty. See, I didn't realize that, but I'm going to keep an eye for that next time I launch it. I have a few sort of questions left that are just kind of more sort of frivolous bonus questions. I guess I call them. On the subject of Atari 50, for both of you, was there a game that you discovered in the process of putting this together

that you now have sort of fallen in love with? Chris, you go first. I'm just, well, you know, nothing that I sort of discovered and new, but I love that we've got Tempest 2000 in there. Like, I'm really excited to get that in there. I mean, that was, I just remember buying, going to KB toy stores back in the day after the prices that all collapsed on the Jaguar stuff

and buying a Jaguar for $20, in Tempest 2000 for $10 because all I'd ever heard about the Jaguar is this is the killer app, this is the game you've got to play. And yeah, it was like tremendous, right? It was just so much fun. And so to have it in there, to have it emulated properly, to really finally have that authentic experience is like, definitely go play Tempest 2000.

It's great. I also played a lot of, I mean, not a lot of club drive, but I played, you know, like an hour just messing around in club driving. I think it's just so cool. I think it's just so interesting. Also, I will absolutely say that with Beyond the Doubt, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy is the second best shooter with an anthropomorphic furry hero that was released in 1993. Well, Chris definitely took my Tempest 2000 answer, which is fine because I think that's what a lot of people say. Every time I boot it up, I tend to just follow the habit trail straight to Tempest 2000 and start playing.

But outside of that, I actually, I reacquainted myself and fell in love with Minor 2049 or all. over again. And we had to do some, we had to modify that game to, because it had keyboard controls for certain levels. So while I was doing all that work, I also added a fast forward button because most of the time in that game, you're just walking and there's nothing you're doing because it's a lot of level to traverse. So by adding that fast forward button, it doesn't ruin anything. The time speeds up everything speeds up. So you can actually just play it the way you want to play it. And so I ended up playing a lot of minor 2049er just for the fun of it with some of these quality of life features on top. So I love that one. And then on the Jaguar, I'd say like

I had always made fun of back in the day, Cybermorph. I take it back, not entirely, but I take most of it back because I end up spending a lot of time playing Cybermorph. For some reason, I can't explain other than it must have been fun. It's just kind of cool and interesting, I guess I would say. And minor 20409 has got to be up there in the game titles Hall of Fame. That's an absolute classic. Yeah. It's great. And the sequel is good. Yeah. What's it called? again um bounty bob strikes back yeah that's the one yeah yeah and it's not you don't have to pay a thousand dollars to get it yeah that's exactly yeah i mean i personally found myself i'm not gonna pretend i hadn't played it before but i got pretty into ninja golf i really like ninja golf oh yeah you

know you know you bring that up like that one i i had the benefit of having that one for years that's one of the games i always pull out when people want like ask like what's cool on the 7800 and it's like i got to check out ninja golf i also worked with uh one of the gentleman who worked on his guy David Sullivan, who told me a lot of the funny stories about it. And I think Retro Gamer covered the story on everything like that. But it was funny that Atari went to the team and said, here's a list of like genres and games we want to do. And there was like, it was like ninjas, golf or whatever.

They just like, all right, ninja and golf, let's do it. They kind of put that together. And David Sullivan, he told me stories about how they would trace over Karatica frames. So the reason the guy looks like the, you know, the Karatica is because they're big Karatka fans are like, how do you draw a ninja? Like, well, let's just trace this one. that's outstanding i think i played it on the links that it came out on the links i think and it might be more i played it i might be completely wrong um i don't know that it came out on the links but

it must it must have been the 7800 one that i played then um you know i love a ninja golf mandela effect i think we just got to you know propagate that okay yeah yeah yeah i exist in the universe where i did come out on links and also the links was way more successful than the crappy little game boy exactly that's the world i live in yeah um i guess um something else I want to ask, which again, this is something that's difficult to ask because you may well be in the process of doing this. If you had like a sort of pipe dream compilation you'd like to work on, what would that be? All right. So picture this. So the phone rings. It's early in the morning. I blearily kind of like grab it from my, from my nightstand. I answer the phone.

It's Miyamoto. And then he's like, Chris, I played Atari 50 and it's incredible. You are the second best game designer on earth. We need you to do for Nintendo what you did for Atari. And I'm like, yes, of course, Neumoto-San, we'd be happy to. I wake up in a cold sweat and they want to go back to the dream, but I can't. I mean, yeah, that's the, that's the, I mean, if you want to ask me what the dream project is, that's it. I mean, otherwise,

there's just, there's just so much out there. There's so many great games out there. And I think that, you know, with Calabunga collection and now Atari 50, soon to be kind of behind us and and out there for people to see, you know, what it is we're trying to do here, that I do think that we're going to get the opportunity to work on great stuff in the future. And I'm just, I'm ready for whatever it is. Yeah, like, of course, Nintendo would be probably the biggest collection we could potentially ever do.

There's so much that, like, we could probably mind to put in there. But if I throw all that away and I can't talk about stuff we're currently working on, then there's the dumb stuff that I really enjoy. And, like, one of those things that I've always wanted to do was make a collection of all the fake games and movies. So, like, Last Starfighter, Superman 3, the Simpsons games, like, was it, was it Lee Trevino? Or no, or is that the real one?

Whatever the golf game was. Oh, Lee Carvel is putting challenge. Cheadrell was putting challenge. Yeah, like all those. Bonestorm. Yeah, put Bonestorm in there. Maybe it's just a Simpsons collection of all their fake games. I mean, I'd like to see a Simpsons collection of the actual Simpsons games,

to be honest. They should let us do that. That's a really, they should, call us immediately. There's a guy online I saw who did a really incredible take on Waterworld, the game from Simpsons, yeah, which I was like, that's amazing too. Now, for the record, we've been talking

about the Simpson thing for a long time, but I felt like he fulfilled the dream somewhat. But yeah, that would be my dream thing. It's like, there's this movie called Nightmares that had a sequence that had Emilio Estevez in it. It was called the Bishop of Battle. I would love to do that game because it was like this vector, crazy vector game been wanting to do that for a while, too.

So it's like, imagine collecting all these up and like one big collection and just talked to all the production designers and then fans who were just like, one day I was hoping I would ever play this game, which would be me basically on camera, I guess. But it'll be fun. Now you got me thinking I just want to see the 8 and 16 bit Simpsons games in a compilation.

Because like you will probably never be able to get the actual Simpsons games or without a lot of effort, but let's just make these games. But now I'm thinking about the idea of having Bart versus the Space Munions with an overlay that tells you how to play it. that'd be something and actual good controls as well man that would be well if you have to do that if anybody if anybody listening if anybody listening like knows what happened to the rights to

those games like give us a call yeah get in touch with stew care of retronauts and he'll pass the message on to us because absolutely I'll pass it on on the condition that I get brought in in some capacity okay for it all and stew will be co-producer where we're good to go and I guess I mean other than the Simpsons I'm going to give you my one anyway which is that I'd really like to see

an equivalent Sega collection but for the Mickey and Donald games and I get that comes up a lot because that's a real you know the Aluge Caste of Illusion Wild Evolution and all that stuff that would be fantastic that's my dream one

All right I'm writing it down thank you thank you yeah go please make that please cancel anything else that you're doing and just do that So I guess finally How Mike Because I think you Based on my research that I did

Did you work on the Midway arcade treasures Back in the PS2 Xbox kind of Yeah I did a bit Yeah I was just sort of wondering how you feel That the kind of retro gaming has changed Like since since the way those games were perceived back then And the way they'd be perceived now really

This goes back a little bit To some of the stuff we were talking about before about, we started with like Mega Man Legacy Collection and the things we wanted to do there. If you go back to really early days digital eclipse, we had done like some of the, we did the first commercial emulation with like Joust Offender Robitron on the Mac. And then following up on that, we had done a PlayStation Midway collection. And at that time, we thought the best thing we could do, not only to put those games, which are only 10 years old at that time, now to think back.

Oh, God. Yeah, now that you mentioned it. Yeah. It was crazy to think it was only in 10 years. But, like, we had the forethought to try to do some video interviews with those, the guys who created the games because they're all still at Midway. So it's like, hey, we have this opportunity. So we did that. And it had come out and people really liked it. But I don't think people appreciated that as much as they do now. And as a result, the later games we would work on, like Midway included and other companies would work with like Activision and whatnot.

Like they basically said, like, we don't need those interviews on stuff. That's just an expense we don't need to add to it because it doesn't move the needle. And I think that was because the games were still. relatively not i mean they're 10 years old not that old like there's just no like need or sense of a need for you know gathering those stories just yet but we've always wanted to do it and we felt like every collection we would do we would get beat up on the don't do all this extra stuff people only care about the games they only care about the games and so it was really hard to get to that moment where we could finally sell people on the value well stuff and i think it's really come

down to as i'm speaking here just spitballing with all you guys here don't tell anybody I'm kidding. I think because the games are so accessible, like what you were saying earlier, where there's other ways to play these games. Yes. That for those who appreciate these games or are interested in the story of these games,

that is the new value. It isn't just people are just buying this to play the games. They're not. I think now people are buying it to either have the quality of life improvements on these games so they can play them like and have the same feeling and an appreciation that they had for these games before

or somebody coming in new can play them and not feel like these are just like junky old games. Like having all this extra stuff here is the value It's not necessarily just the games themselves Yeah, it's interesting I mean going from sort of almost quantity To more towards quality Because I remember the PS2 stuff would have

Something like Tito Legends We'd have something like 55 games on it And one of them was some of them were just broken Like because I mean the controls weren't right You couldn't finish them But there were so many You were just like oh it's G Darrius, who cares But no I mean I think what you guys

I think what you're doing is is good, and it's helping to alleviate my frustration when people say, like, oh, I'm not paying $5, $6 for Super Mario Bros. 3, which makes me want to kill them. But, yeah, I never know how to end these things. So I just say thank you very much for doing this. I've enjoyed it immensely. Hopefully we will speak again in some capacity at some point.

Maybe if you do Atari 100. at some point But I guess Well we have your wish list So we'll just We're going to get to work On making all those games You know it's funny because you did say like

When Blizzard Arcade collection came out It was like oh this This would be a 10 out of 10 If they had lost Vikings 2 And you know RBM racing in there And of course at that point We knew they were going to go in

It was just a matter of timing That had to be in a And it was going to be in an update you know So I'm like I remember I mentioned it to Mike on Twitter, actually. I sort of said, oh, it's a sort of a shame they're not in there. And his response was just basically, you know, well,

you go on it. Right, right, right, yeah. That's the worst because we put these games out and people are like, we should have had this, whatever, and it's like, we may have already submitted that, but we can't see anything just yet because, you know, there's a lot of reasons for not being able to say everything we want to say, but like, that's like one of the worst parts is like people make these criticisms even before, like, on Atari 50, there's all these criticisms people were putting on Twitter before they even

knew what it was and complaining about like they won't talk about this, they won't talk about that and whatever. And it's like, and we had all that stuff in there. We'll find out. They'll find out we're going to talk about all of that stuff. Yeah, Rob Phillips, getting just a turkey. Yeah, you're going to find out about that. Right, right, right. I've thought of the perfect thing to end with, actually. Now, there's six new games in Atari 50,

and there are six locked games in Atari 50. Now, one of them I, I don't, I don't, it's spoilers. One of them I unlocked by completely the museum, but the rest of them, one of them is haunted house. I know that one, I found that we found that one. The rest of them are a mystery, so I've got to ask you for an end. I'll at least one of them. I'd say for Quadratotank, which is the only one I really know off top of my head.

Play around like rockets, rockets and controlling rockets around the map are going to be very helpful. Gotcha. Okay. These are going to be really hard to find, aren't they? Okay. Well, you know, no, vector sector just get very far into like a later level. Yeah. You saw the poems, right? Oh, yes. Yes, I did. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, read those. Read those. Think about the, yes, that was Dan Amrick. What are the other member of the editorial team who I know he designs puzzles. I mean, I've known him for a really long time. And I know he's super into puzzles and writing puzzle poems and stuff like that. And so any opportunity, I'm like, Dan, write poetry. And he'll crank it out immediately. And it's like brilliant. It's like it's, you have to know your team's strengths. That's great. Okay, well, again, thanks very much, and hopefully we'll switch you soon, and I'll be keeping it out for everything you're putting out and continuing to be an unabashed fanboy clinging to you like a limpid. Thank you.

No, I mean, we've seen all your stuff. We've really appreciate your support on this. We really do. Great. That's great. Cool. And I'm going to do the bit where we plug things, which I think can be plugged into the end of the episode, perhaps. So let's plug. Lewis, where can people find you on the internet, please? Yeah, so sagodrim.com is the website.

All the socials are linked on the main page, if you want to follow us on various platforms. There is an accompanying YouTube channel, YouTube.com. slash at Sega driven lots of weird videos about niche Sega stuff told by someone who cares I guess

and yeah if you want to follow me personally I'm on Twitter at Kronkblatz but I'm not really using it too much at the moment because Twitter is a cesspit so I've jumped over to Mastodon and you can find me on there as Sonic Yoda and I'm on the Mastodon.com social

instance Funny Mastodon Every time I'm just like oh God forget it I'm not saying it's horrible or anything It's just like I can't get my head round it yet I just for me personally

I just every time I load up Twitter I get bombarded with just the absolute worst of the world And when I go on Mastodon It feels like a nicer time for my head So that's generally why I'm using it at the moment Well now that Twitter is being You know controlled by What can I say

A tech genius It's sure to improve and short term As for me I'm sure it's yep you can find me at Stupacabra on Twitter still for the time being. I'm also on co-host and under the same name and I'll probably join Macedon at some point and I'll let you know when when Twitter collapses.

But until then I'm clinging on with my skin on my teeth because I loved that site, man. I loved it. You can also read my stuff at Retronauts.com and I do a webcomic. It's called Maryhill. Read Maryhill. MerriHellcomic.com. There's nothing to do with video games.

Cheers. Good stuff. And with that, we come to the end of the bit that isn't an interview. so thank you for listening and I'm not sure if this is going to be edited to the end. Thank you.