Atari, the classic gaming company, has optimized eight of its most popular games for the web. Asteroids, Combat, Centipede, Lunar Lander, Missile Command, Pong, Super Breakout and Yar’s Revenge are now available for play through the Atari Arcade. Accessible via any modern browser, the online arcade was created in conjunction with Microsoft with IE 10 specifically in mind. Here’s some info from TechCrunch:

Atari plans to add over 100 games to its library in the coming months. … Many of these games, and especially Missile Command, have been optimized for multi-touch capable devices running IE10 and Windows 8. Most of the games also feature multi-player capabilities using WebSockets (or SocketIO on older browsers).

As [Microsoft's general manager or IE Ryan Gavin] notes in a blog post today, “most modern, successful video game franchises are still inspired by Atari’s original creative concepts” and the Atari Arcade is meant to be “an updated take” on these classic games. Multi-touch, Gavin stressed, also brings a new level of interaction to these classic games that wasn’t possible before. The only difference between playing the games on Windows 8 and IE10 and other browsers is that Atari will show ads on other browsers.

Since Atari expects these games to be played on a wide range of machines and browsers, they built in a feature that allows the games to switch between 3D and 2D depending on the user’s processing power. How’s that for understanding your end user matrix?

The people behind the Atari Arcade project are so dedicated to the idea of expanding online gaming that they made many of their tools publicly available – including code samples, a full SDK and a brand new tool they developed for converting Flash based games into HTML5. They’ll even teach you how they did it:

In addition to these tools, the developers are offering in-depth tear-downs of how they created the games in HTML5 as well as tutorials for building browser-based games.

Read the full article at TechCrunch >>>

(You can access the develop tools in any browser by going directly to the developer URL, but if you want to use the register, login or developer tools options straight from the arcade page you’ll need to be using IE. The menu bar doesn’t seem to appear in other browsers.)

Plenty of gaming companies have been embracing (and abandoning) HTML5 recently, but with a giant name like Atari giving HTML5 a go, it might have just gotten a nice boost.

(On a personal note, I’m not crazy about the UI. Thoughts?)