Gaming Pioneer company dies: Atari has hit bankrupcy

Didn't know if you know it already, so far haven't seen anything on this site, but Atari is now hitting bankrupcy regarding reports on several websites like Businessweek, G4TV etc.

What are your feelings about this?

For my part, I'm sad one of the early pioneers of gaming dies down, can remember having played on their console and their game from time to time.

To be honest, Atari has really for the last several years just been a name that's been used. They died a while ago.

The seem to be pulling a Rare. Tha tis milking their past glory instead of making something new. I remember them selling their old arcade in home machines.

Atari was still around? :P

Don't get me wrong. I liked Atari back in the day, I recognize their signifigance in video game history, and I was a huge supporter of theirs back in the 2600, 5200, 7800 and Lynx days, but they have just been constantly shooting themselves in the foot over and over again for years. In the 2600 days they drove all of their good developers out to start their own 3rd party Atari game development companies, they squandered goldmine licenses by farting out terrible games with them (cough, ET, cough). In the 7800 days until today they were killed by their total lack of PR for their hardware products. The 7800 beat the 8bit NES to the punch by a year and had full backwards compatiblity with the entire 2600 library, but nobody even knew the thing existed.

Same goes for the Lynx, which I was aware of only because I was buying literally the first issues of EGM (I started with EGM #2). The Lynx was color, backlit, at least 4 player multiplayer, reversable for left and right handed players, supported portrait display games, had some of the earliest hardware accelerated graphics with native scaling and rotating of sprites much like the SNES's Mode 7 that came later, and yet in spite of all of these advantages the non-backlit, black and white Gameboy took it out back and threw it in the woodchipper all Fargo-style. I only ever saw two commercials for the Lynx, and they were back to back 15-second spots. I saw them literally once.

And don't even get me started on the Jaguar. A system that nobody even knew existed until it had been discontinued and that, by most people's estimation, LITERALLY had two decent games (AvP and Tempest 2000). That's not even mentioning the atrocity that was its controller, which basically made it clear that Atari had learned nothing from Colecovision or the Atari 5200.

In spite of all of this, I see a future for Atari. They need to stop producing games and begin working in the government sector protecting state secrets. They would be massively successful at this, because the best way to ensure that people don't find out about something is to have Atari try to market it.

-Byshop

They really have been dead for a while. They haven't put out anything noteworthy in I don't know how long.

A sad milestone, though.

To be honest, Atari has really for the last several years just been a name that's been used. They died a while ago.

GT90

Yeah, in 2003 Infogrames licensed the Atari name and logo and changed their name to Atari, Inc. That's the company that died. And the real atari was dead years before that...and irrelevant years even before that.