One of the top uses for HTML5 technology has long been reported to be gaming. Atari and Microsoft (News – Alert) are teaming up to take that use to the next level with the release of several old-school arcade games onto the browser. Thanks to HTML5, Atari is celebrating its 40th birthday by releasing eight of its most popular games onto the universal format that HMTL5 provides. This programming language is easy enough for software to understand that it can be played on the regular old desktop, the laptop or even mobile devices such as an Android (News – Alert) phone or the iPad.

These new games have been optimized so that they will work best on Internet Explorer 10 (hence the partnership with Microsoft) but they will work on any other browsers as well. In order to make it possible to bring these games back to life, Atari’s new browser-based arcade uses some of the time’s best HTML5 tech including CSS3 standards such as WebSockets, CSS3 media queries, font and text glow, as well as CSS3D transitions and of course, animations.

The best news of all, for people who love the old Atari brand of games, the company isn’t stopping with the initial eight. The plan is to eventually have more than 100 games in the browser-based arcade. For now, players will have to settle for Asteroids, Combat, Centipede, Lunar Lander, Missile Command, Pong, Super Breakout and Yar’s Revenge. Microsoft appears to be taking advantage of theincreasedpopularity of HTML5 to show off its Windows 8 format as most of the games have also been touch enabled and enhanced.

The developers behind putting these old Atari games on the web have madenobones about the difficulties of taking these titles and moving them over the HTML5. The team has even put together a tear-down, detailing just how hard it was and what steps they had to go through to get them good to go. Even if you don’t have a touch screen and are not running the games through Internet Explorer you should be able to have plenty of fun with these old titles.The only real difference should you choose to run them on Chrome, Safari or Firefox is that ads will appear from time to time.

Want to learn more about HTML5? Then be sure to attend HTML5 Summit- a DEVCON5 Event, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX.  Stay in touch with everything happening at HTML Summit. Follow us on Twitter.