There must be at least a few retro gamers with lingering nostalgia for the Atari 7800. The modern-day Atari is betting there are. The company’s Gamescom 2024 follow-up to last year’s landmark 2600+ is not the beleaguered 5200 but 1986’s Atari 7800. Just like its previous recreation console, the new 7800+ can play your attic’s worth of dusty cartridges for the near-30-year-old console, but it has the added benefit of wireless controllers and extra-backward compatibility with 2600 games.
This isn’t the GameStation Plus Atari and My Arcade pushed at the beginning of 2023. The $130 7800+ looks exactly like the 38-year-old console and plays the actual cartridges. You might struggle to find many games from yesteryear compatible with the 7800. The console saw a bare 59 official games on the platform. Most were revitalized versions of arcade classics, including a version of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong. Luckily, the original 7800 worked with the 2600 games, so the new 7800+ does as well.
So why would Atari think you’ll buy a retro console you don’t remember to play games you probably never owned? Atari has actually reached deeper into its library and community for novel, old-school titles. The console comes with a copy of Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest. It was originally a homebrew Atari title developed by Robert DeCrescenzo back in 2014, and now it’s getting new life as an official title on the 7800+.
DeCrescenzo also helped program Asteroids Deluxe, Space Duel, Frenzy, Berzerk, and the Atari 5200 game Bounty Bob Strikes Back! to the 7800 era. Bounty Bob was a sequel to the 1983 game Miner 2049er, and it’s now getting a full cartridge release on the 7800+. Atari is shipping ten cartridges separately alongside the 7800+, though that doesn’t include all the 2600+ games already available for $30 a pop.
The new console works with modern TVs with support for widescreen or 4:3 aspect ratios if you want to have that original feel to your games. There are still two ports for controllers, but now it comes with a single CX78+ gamepad with wireless connectivity. If you were hoping for two players, you’d need to pay an extra $35 for a wireless gamepad or the new CX40+ wireless joystick. It includes a USB-C charging cable, though you’ll need to find your power brick to give it juice.
Sure, the 7800 doesn’t have nearly as much pedigree as the Atari 2600, though it was a very interesting product of its time. The console arrived three years after the fabled games crash of 1983. To avoid the flood of poor-quality titles that led to the original crash, Atari required developers to send them the game in advance so they could sign them digitally.
The 7800 infamously debuted the same year as the Nintendo Entertainment System, so the Japanese game giant quickly overshadowed it. It also lacked many platformers to compete with Super Mario Bros., which didn’t help its popularity. Atari eventually dropped support for the console in 1992.
