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Digital Eclipse has revealed the next piece of DLC coming to its documentary-like game collection Atari 50, and it’s focused on classic Namco video games. Aptly titled The Namco Connection, it will feature the Atari versions of classic arcade games by the Japanese publisher, including the best-selling but infamous version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600.
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This $8 DLC is part of a wider collaboration between Atari and Bandai Namco (Namco merged with Bandai in 2006) to celebrate Pac-Man’s 45th anniversary. It will be released sometime later this year.
What is included in Atari 50’s Namco DLC?
Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and more are coming to Atari 50
For those unfamiliar with Atari 50, this isn’t just a collection of ROMs featuring classic games. It also tells the story of the games it features through interactive timelines that include developer interviews and viewable developer documents and advertisements from the 1980s and 1990s. The Namco Connection’s dedicated timeline will highlight Atari and Namco’s relationship during the heyday of both companies, the story of Atari and Namco’s intertwined histories through interviews and archived assets from when these games were made.
While a full game list has not been revealed yet, players can expect this DLC to feature versions of these classic Namco franchises for platforms like Atari 2600 and Atari 7800:
- Pac-Man
- Dig-Dug
- Galaga
- Galaxian
- Xevious
Of all the games included in The Namco Collection, the most notable one is the Atari 2600 of Pac-Man. It was the best-selling game for the Atari 2600, selling millions of copies when gaming was still in its nascent stages in the early 1980s. That said, it’s also infamous for being a pretty terrible port of the arcade classic, as a lot of compromises had to be made to get Pac-Man to work on Atari’s rudimentary console. It’s considered an early domino in what eventually resulted in the video game industry crash of the early 1980s.
This DLC will likely tackle what exactly happened there, from Atari’s perspective. I enjoy Atari 50, so I’m excited to check out this new DLC when it launches for $80 sometime later this year.
It’s not the only way Atari and Bandai Namco are working together to celebrate Pac-Man’s 45th anniversary, though. Atari is creating Pac-Man-themed versions of its Atari 2600+ console and CX40+ joysticks and releasing Pac-Man: Double Feature, a 2-in-1 cartridge that includes Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 and a new version of Pac-Man made for the Atari 7800.
Finally, Atari is re-releasing the Atari 7800 versions of Galaga, Dig Dug, and Xevious on cartridge as part of what it’s calling the High Score Collection. Pre-orders for all of these additional items will go live on July 23.
