The virtue of the Atari games is that they can run at 500 FPS per core, so you can train an RL agent in an hour on a small cluster. When working on fundamentals

The virtue of the Atari games is that they can run at 500 FPS per core, so you can train an RL agent in an hour on a small cluster. When working on fundamentals of the algorithms, being able to iterate quickly makes a huge difference in overall progress. Of course, the idea is that once the algorithms work well we can apply them to real problems, where they'll take months or years to learn something valuable.