this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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Atari still exists?
Not really. Strap in.
Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976, before the 2600 was a thing. Warner eventually cracked them in half and sold the home-gizmo division to Jack Tramiel in 1984, after the 2600 was wrecked by shovelware. The remaining arcade division was sold to Williams in 1996.
The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers which all bombed. Their hail-Mary was the Jaguar. That's how bad it got. Hasbro bought that wreck of a company, struggled, and spun it off into its own company, which bombed. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought that wreck of a company for reasons I've never understood. French studio Infogrames bought JTS for the Atari brand, wore it like a dead skin mask, made a few notable titles like Gauntlet Legends, got stuck in a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent, and bombed. Some middle-eastern tech-bro collective bought that wreck of a company for the Atari brand, spent a decade in vapor-ware hell, clunked out a weird PC nobody bought, and bombed.
The arcade division under Warner did quite well after 1984 and released a bunch of games you've probably heard of. Eventually "Time Warner Interactive" was purchased by Midway (which was owned by Bally (which was owned by Williams)) and released even more games you've probably heard of. That lasted until arcades stopped existing, at which point, it bombed. A decade later, Warner bought them again, through the purchase of Midway's assets, but made no effort to re-use the brand. They just wanted Mortal Kombat.
This Atari - the one that recently released a vaguely-admirable home gizmo that's basically a Raspberry Pi running Stella - is the finance-bro shell company that apparently found more money under a couch cushion. And they spent some of it buying back classic franchises? Bravo, I suppose. They're still precariously close to being a bombed-out wreck of a company... again.
I swear, that logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. You know it kills companies. But they can't help themselves. Seventh time's the charm! So they put it on, and oh no, everything went wrong somehow. Who could have seen this coming?
In name only
Well, they did just recently release a console in like, 2016 or 2018 I think. I dont think it was very good or widely recieved, but they did do it! Not just a remake either an entirely new system that plays new games check it out on their website. You can run Linux on it
Didn't know about this. Looks neat! Thanks!
To elaborate, atari went bankrupt ages ago, and it's just had the IP rights to various things chopped up and sold around many times since then. The amount atari exists is just to whatever extent the current owner wants to monetize the name.
Not really. Infogrames is wearing the skin and parading around pretending they are Atari. Its like that Russian guy that thinks he's Napoleon.