Atari

This October, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver will be releasing a handheld cooking game on Nintendo DS. What's Cooking? With Jamie Oliver will simulate real-life cooking situations, from selecting ingredients at the supermarket to plating meals at the table. The Atari video game will have an interactive cookbook featuring 100 of the celebrity chef's original recipes, alongside photographs taken by David Loftus. Oliver believes that the game will help him reach his goal of motivating more people to cook simple, delicious food:

I'm really excited about bringing a book's worth of my recipes to a game for the first time. You can cook my recipes for real at home or in the game's 3D kitchens, but what's brilliant is that you can come up with your own recipes then share them with your mates and family over wi-fi. Lovely.

The game will include a series of real-time virtual challenges that involve real-life chopping, stirring, and plating; recipe cook-offs with other players; and a timed competition against the clock. All of this will take place in three-dimensional kitchen settings with measures of quality and taste.

Are you into video games? Will you play What's Cooking? With Jamie Oliver?

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Do you remember Atari? The way-cool-at-the-time arcade and home video gaming systems of the 1970s and early-1980s? I sure do. I have distinct memories of whiling away hours on end in basements playing games like Pong and Pitfall. I remember learning the word "joystick" and thinking it was a funny, yet appropriate, term.

Anyway, there's now a movie in the works about Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, with Leonardo DiCaprio set to star as this "creator of Atari and one of the founding fathers of the vidgame industry." Variety continues:

Although Bushnell's life rights had long been pursued by various suitors, [screenwriter Brian] Hecker and Craig Sherman convinced the gaming pioneer that they could do his unique story justice. Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari Inc. in 1972 and were instrumental in bringing arcade games, home vidgame consoles and home computers to the masses.

To top things off, Brain Hecker is writing the script, and he's responsible for having penned one of my favorite films from this year's Tribeca Film Festival, Bart Got A Room. This project seems so random to me, but I'm also both amused and intrigued to see what happens with it.

If you think your Atari knowledge is pretty impressive, take Geek's quiz and test the ol' memory.

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Most of today's Xboxers, wii-meisters, Playstation players and portable video game junkies flip on their consoles and handhelds with little knowledge of the gaming legacy that came before them. This month marks the 40th anniversary of the day Ralph Baer, a German-born inventor who fled to America from fascist Germany, built and played the first home-video game. While I didn't know much about Baer's "Brown Box" before reading Magazine's retrospective, Console Portraits: A 40-Year Pictorial History of Gaming, I can't help but get a little nostalgic for the days of Atari, Nintendo and even Gameboy.

To check additional vintage images of video gaming,  read more