Atari 400 Mini review – a fascinating adventure in the land of 8-bit

Yes, it's a museum piece - but this mini Atari home console, reconfigured for modern gaming systems, offers a compelling retro experience

To a kid growing up in the UK in the 1980s, the Atari 400 and 800 machines seemed impossibly glamorous. While most of my friends had Commodore 64s or ZX Spectrums (along with the occasional Amstrad or Acorn Electron), I only ever saw Atari computers on cool TV shows and movies, such as Videodrome and Police Story. Launched in 1979, these two models boasted an Antic video processor providing superior graphics for the era, as well as a sound chip named Pokey for improved audio. They were, like the Apple II, seminal machines for young game coders looking to create new types of experience beyond simple arcade conversions.

Opening up the new Atari 400 Mini was, then, an oddly emotional experience. The latest nostalgic release from Retro Games is a nicely detailed facsimile of the original computer, featuring a non-functional version of its famed membrane keyboard in luscious 1970s beige, orange and brown, as well as four joystick ports along the base (now USB rather than the original Atari joystick port standard). The console comes with a new version of the classic Atari CX40 joystick, which subtly adds eight extra buttons, thereby allowing for the fact that Atari 400/800 games could call on the keyboard to provide extra input options.