Buying back the family estate
Atari has announced that they’ve acquired “100 PC and console titles from the 1980s and 1990s.” That’s not impressive, Atari. I own way more than that.
“This is a deep catalog that includes groundbreaking and award-winning titles from Accolade, Infogrames, and Microprose,” said Atari CEO Wade Rosen.
The full list of purchases hasn’t been disclosed, but the mentioned titles are, “Bubsy, Hardball, Demolition Racer series, as well as the 1942: Pacific Air War, F-117A, and F-14 air combat series.” This deal also results in Atari gaining the Accolade and GTI brands.
What? I suppose “re-acquired” might be more accurate here. For starters, the current iteration of Atari stems from Infogrames. In late 2000, Infogrames acquired Hasbro Interactive, who were then the holders of the Atari brand. They then proceeded to rebrand the company over to the Atari name until filing for bankruptcy protection in 2013. As part of their turnaround, they sold of a bunch of their assets to other companies. The lion’s share of what they’ve bought back appears to be what was acquired by Tommo, who had been trying to resurrect the Accolade brand.
This whole thing is a bit of a mess, but it seems to boil down to Atari trying to get its properties back, as well as any that are adjacent to the brand. They recently bought the rights to 12 games from Stern Interactive.
Preservatives
This all seems to indicate that Atari is driven toward the preservation of its back catalog and perhaps beyond. In 2021, Atari started the process of acquiring retro streaming service Antstream and the indispensable game database Mobygames, finalizing the deal in 2022. Most recently, they bought up Nightdive Studios, a prominent developer responsible for source-porting many classic titles, including PowerSlave and Doom 64.
While the company has investments in the Web3 space and has made many missteps over the past decade, its CEO, Wade Rosen, who stepped into power at the company in 2021, at least seems to have some commitment to moving the company away from mobile and free-to-play titles that marred its reputation in the past. I’m both skeptical and cynical, but recent activity from the company has me feeling… Ew, what is this? Optimism? Gross.
We’ll have to wait and see, but for now, we can at least expect to see ports of the games purchased in the deal; as Wade Rosen went on to say, “Many of these titles are a part of Atari history, and fans can look forward to seeing many of these games re-released in physical and digital formats, and in some cases, even ported to modern consoles.”
