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Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is getting another set of DLC, and we think a lot of you didn’t even expect this one to happen.
As reported by Gematsu, Digital Eclipse has collaborated with Bandai Namco to make The Namco Legendary Pack. This DLC is coming in 2025 for $ 7.99 to all the platforms that already have Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.
This pack will have the Namco games that were published on Atari’s consoles, and it will also get into the history between the two companies. And there’s a lot of history there that even predates the games themselves.
The Real History Of Atari In Japan
In 1973, the original Atari led by Nolan Bushnell launched a division in Japan. This venture became a huge disaster for the company, and so they scrambled to find a local company to take it off their hands. Bushnell’s fixer Ron Gordon would make a deal with Namco founder Masaya Nakamura to sell for $ 550,000.
This deal would make Namco the exclusive distributor of Atari’s games in Japan, and it would prompt Nakamura to start a real game studio in the company. In a roundabout way, Atari failing to make it in Japan led to Namco becoming a video game developer.
And so, the development of Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and the rest of Namco’s history all happened because of Atari failing in Japan. This will be covered in this upcoming DLC, but along the way, we should be getting these ports of these games:
- Pac-Man on the Atari 2600
- Dig Dug on the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Atari 7800
- Galaxian on the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200
- Xevious on the Atari 7800
- Galaga on the Atari 7800
One Big DLC Mystery
On the side, we know that Atari and Bandai Namco worked together to make a new version of Pac-Man for the Atari 7800, that’s much closer to the arcade original than the historical release on the Atari 2600. This version is getting a physical retail release as part of Pac-Man Double Feature 7800. But will it also be part of The Namco Legendary Pack?
We don’t know the answer to this one, at least for now. But we would not be surprised if it was Digital Eclipse themselves who made that new game for the classic console, and that part of the deal around this collaboration was to add it to the DLC as well.
You can watch the official trailer for Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration DLC The Namco Legendary Pack below.
