Sep 05, 2012 Discuss: Play classic Atari games online for free Sign in to comment. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. Play 2600 Games Online in high quality. All the retro Atari 2600 games for the retro gamer, there are many 2600 games in the collection. Start playing favorite 2600 emulator games now and use the menu on the right to browse game collections. Feel free to comment on and upvote the best 2600 games you enjoyed playing!
Atari is taking remakes of its classic games to browser gaming, completely free to play.
The new website, called Atari Arcade, coincides with the 40th anniversary of the launch of Atari's first-ever game, Pong, which was released back in September 1972. It uses HTML 5 to support multi-touch-based play on upcoming Windows 8 tablets using Internet Explorer 10.
But the games work in most of today's browsers, sans touch compatibility.
Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, said in a post on the Windows blog:
Forty years ago, gaming required a dedicated console, but today, the web is an incredibly rich platform that has the power to drive games and bring entirely new methods of interaction with games, like touch, that were not possible in a browser just a few short years ago. What is exciting about gaming on the web is the reach it offers. It is not a potential audience of thousands, or millions, but billions of people that can access and enjoy gaming online!
There are eight classic games, so far, to be played on the website: Pong, Super Breakout, Yar's Revenge, Asteroids, Centipede, Combat, Lunar Lander, and Missile Command — with more games from the Atari classics library to be released over the coming months.
Atari Browser Games
It's very heavy-handed with the Microsoft partnership, though, with ads in Chrome and Firefox (but none in IE), and constant reminders to download the latest IE browsers. The games, themselves, are ad-free, which is something.
More excitingly, the website offers developers the opportunity to get in on the Atari Arcade action, with a downloadable developer kit, tutorials and code. Free notation composer download full version.
Head on over to the Atari Arcade for some lunch-time gaming here.