Retro Gaming Australia

Hot off the heels of his Super Mario Bros. project Princess Rescue, homebrew developer Sprybug has brought Mario’s cross-platform rival Sonic the Hedgehog to the Atari 2600.

A short demo ROM of the game can be downloaded from AtariAge.

The project is quite early, but it’s still pretty impressive what Sprybug has managed to accomplish in a short period of time.

Ontario-based film company Fuel has obtained permission from the Alamogordo’s City Commission allowing them access to the city’s landfill for a period of six months. The reason? The company wishes to make a documentary on the excavation of of millions of unsold Atari 2600 cartridges which were said to have been buried there.

For those who don’t know, Atari was stuck with millions of unsold copies of games such as Pac-Man and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial after the 1982 holiday season. The company had foolishly believed that people would buy Atari 2600s solely for these games, and produced more copies of the games than there were 2600 systems in households. These excess copies were said to have been buried in a New Mexico landfill in September 1983.

Susie Galea, the Almogordo city mayor seems to approve of the project, stating “I hope more people find out about Alamogordo through this opportunity that we have to unearth the Atari games in the landfill.”

Word has come through the grapevine that a number of Activision’s Atari VCS classics such as River Raid and Pitfall! can be found in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and are fully playable.

The video above will show you all you need to know to get a taste of VCS goodness.

Via Retrospekt

The newly-formed mobile division over at Activision is revisiting the old Activision classic Pitfall!

Originally released back in 1982 for the Atari 2600 (and ported to just about everything else 8-bit), Pitfall! was a big success – it was the second highest selling game for the Atari 2600 and is adored by fans still to this day.

“We’ve been working on Pitfall since earlier in the year when we set up and it has been really good to revisit that and bring it to a modern audience” Activision’s Martyn Brown told MCV, keen to dispel last week’s rumours that a Call of Duty for smartphones was underway instead. “Pitfall for smartphones is a fresh take” he continued, however no details as to what this entails have yet be provided.

Pitfall! turns 30 in September of this year – 3 months ahead of me. We are old.