Atari Celebrates 40th Anniversary With Free (Kinda) Games

Atari, the first successful arcade video game manufacturer and the king of home video games in the 1980′s is/would have turned 40 this week. Depending on how you look at things. The brand is still around, but the company that Nolan Bushnell founded– and famously employed Steve Jobs at one time– has long since gone the way of, well, Pong.

There have been some great retrospectives offered up this week. Yet perhaps the most touching is the one on iOS… heh, I’m punchy… wherein the current Atari is “giving away” the entire library of its Greatest Hits App for free. A limited time offer that has a catch: if you delete the app from your device so too will the free games go away. Usually the app comes with one free game and the rest are something you can purchase in pieces or as a collection, with the option to toss them back into the cloud if you want to free up space on your device. Not so for this offer.

It’s kinda like those dreams you might have had as a kid: of getting to sneak into the arcade at night when the attendant had set all the machines to “Free Play”.

Go ahead. Live the dream.

via: toucharcade

Image vis: Apple App Store