Atari To Release Old Games and New Console System

GrueMaster writes "Atari is announcing the re-release of their older games for the PS2 & Xbox. They are also talking about releasing a new console, which is a miniaturized version of the 7800 with built in games. Check out the story here. Being a collector of old Atari stuff, I'll be in line to get mine."

An Atari by any other name still smells as sweet

[stecoop]

For those of you that followed Atari back in the day; you may be surprised to see the name rise from the grave. The name was bought by Infogrames [infogrames.com]:

On May 7, 2003, Infogrames officially announces its name change to Atari. The Company's U.S. operations became Atari, Inc. (formerly Infogrames, Inc.) and changed its trading symbol on the NASDAQ National Market to "ATAR." Although the holding company parent in France, Infogrames Entertainment SA, retained its current name and maintained its symbol on the Euronext under the code: 5257, all of the Company's worldwide operations were renamed Atari. The Company gained all rights to the Atari license when it acquired Hasbro Interactive, Inc. in December 2000.

I guess this is a re-re-re-release (I probably don't have enough res) of the old titles; it make me wonder how long will these games will be around?

More details...

[JamesD_UK]

See here [atari.com] for more details of the Atari Flashback Classic Game Console.

Re:Lots of issues

[Shadow Wrought]

but I'm not sure I would pay $45 for a PS2 CD.

Well, you won't have to. The CD is $20, the mini console with twin joysticks (Oldskool Style) and built in games is $45.

Re:foo

[aka-ed]

The cd is $20.

The retro console is $45.

Next time, don;t read so fast in your rush to "fp"

Atari's game image

[BorgDrone]

Too bad atari (the old atari, not the current owner of the brand) had an image as game console company, they made a great desktop system, the Atari ST. Man I loved that machine, I still have my Mega ST 1 lying around somewhere.
While my friends where fooling around with DOS, I had a system with a GUI (in 128KB rom) a nice high-res 640x480 monochrome monitor. I used WYSIWYG dtp and word processing software (great for school papers) while the rest still used WordPerfect for DOS.
It was cheaper than an IBM PC too.

Too bad their marketing department sucked ass, everybody assumed an Atari was a game system, and I had to explain over and over again they make desktops too.

Re:2800

[GerbilSoft]

Not quite. The 2800 was the Japanese version of the 2600. There were also several other oddly numbered systems that were and weren't released, such as the 2700 (2600 with RF controllers).

The 2800 really existed

[mr_angry]

The Atari 2800 existed, in Japan, looked like the 7800
You can find info about it on the net, i found some on http://www.atarihq.com/museum/2678/2800.html [atarihq.com]
They also say it was sold in the USA by Sears...

The complete list...

[Anonymous Coward]

The complete list of games found in Atari Flashback includes:

Adventure(TM)
Air Sea Battle(TM)
Asteroids®
Battlezone®
Breakout®
Ca nyon Bomber
Centipede®
Crystal Castles®
Desert Falcon(TM)
Food Fight(TM)
Gravitar®
Haunted House(TM)
Millipede®
Planet Smashers(TM)
Saboteur(TM)
Sky Diver(TM)
Solaris(TM)
Sprintmaster(TM)
Warlords ®
Yar's Revenge

Personally, I won't be buying this. The only Atari game I want to play again is 'Dungeon Master' - but that wasn't a console game as I recall. I used to play it on my Atari ST way back in 1988 or so. That was one cool game!

Acording to Atari.com...

[rubberbando]

The Anthology [atari.com] has 18 arcade games and 62 Atari 2600 games. And the mini-console [atari.com] is going to be a mixture of 2600 and 7800 games.

Re:Lots of issues

[OoSync]

Here's what I think Atari should do: Create a console on par with the SNES. That sort of hardware should be extremely cheap at this point, and could easily be manufactured for retail prices in the $20-$40 range. Sell simple "smart card" games (or something equally as inexpensive to manufacture) for $5-$10 a piece.

Its called a Game Boy Advance. It satisfies all of your criteria, and games from the Atari-era forward are often rereleased on it. You can even play those games on a TV using the GameBoy Player from Nintendo, or a hardware modification available online.

Nostalgia for the NES...

[rubberbando]

2600, 5200, Intellivision, Coleco nostalgia I can see... As well as NES, of course... But wasn't the 7800 a terrible flop? Eh. Good luck, Atari. You'll need it. Nintendo can sell us Excitebike, Zelda and Super Mario again because they always were and will be great games. Anything that could be considered "great" on the 2600 was only because we didn't have anything better.

I know I'll probably get modded for being offtopic, but there is a comparable mini-console for NES games. They have a kiosk over the mall near where I live, I think the device is called "SuperJoy" or something like that. Anyways, its $50 and claims to have 2000 NES games built in (in reality its closer to 100 or so games). It comes with 2 gamepads and a lightgun. Everytime I pass their display, I'm tempted to buy one. I'm sure if you google "Superjoy" or "PowerJoy", you might find one of these gray market devices.

Recently when I was over there, I noticed that have a new device they are selling. It's a stand-alone DDR pad (also $50), but the stupid thing is 8-bit and I can't imagine who would want to play DDR to old midi music. :-P

This Atari is not THAT Atari.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't confuse the two.

The old one was American this new one is French.

The old one was all about creating original games - the new one has yet to create a successful original franchise. Name one!

The old one was kinda cool. The games industry *should* be cool - watching the new Atari try to be cool is like watching your father disco dancing. It's just lame and embarrasing.

In fact the only thing they have in common is the old name. Something which resulted from Infogrames lawyers dusting off the deeds discovered in Hasboro's basement.

Re:Lots of issues

[AndyChrist]

I really like your idea of a mini console w/ smart card based games. If they did that and did not lock it down too hard it would be a hacking dream!

You mean like the GP32 [gp32world.co.uk]?

Here is what it will look like...

[Necromutant]

http://www.atari.com/us/games/atari_flashback/7800 [atari.com] Not bad, but I don't really dig the game selection.

Re:Nostalgia for the 7800?

[huchida]

IIRC the 7800 flopped because it was also behind the times-- it was out around the same time as the NES, but the games were just rehashes of the same old thing (Robotron, Breakout, Galaga etc.) with better graphics. What kid in his right mind would choose that over Super Mario Brothers?

Re:Sound

[Mister Skippy]

Guantlet is a Midway title (something about the difference between Atari's Arcade and Atari's Console divisions being split up). If you'd like Guantlet purchase Midway Arcade Treasures [midway.com]

Re:Atari's game image

[dmaxwell]

ST = 8 Mhz
Amiga = 7.2 Mhzzzzzzz...


Well, I had an ST and I had an 800XL before that. You know what? If I had it to do over again, I'd rather have had the Amiga. The graphics chipset more than offset the slight speed difference between the two processors. Don't get me wrong, the ST had some GREAT games and software but the Amiga graphics setup was simply more capable.

Thanks to Amiga inheriting Atari's old hardware engineers, the Amiga was MUCH more like an Atari than the ST itself. Display lists, graphics hardware that can work off any area in memory, a wide color palette, graphics coprocessors, and all sorts of ways the hardware helped you when trying to animate anything were all Atari 8-bit features that were done bigger and better in the Amiga. The Atari 8-bits owed quite a bit to Jay Miner's genius. The Commodore 16-bits felt like the next generation of those machines and have his handiwork as well.

Ironically, ex-Commodore engineers had a hand in the ST. Some aspects of the ST do indeed feel like a Commodore 64 16 bits wide.

Re:An Atari by any other name still smells as swee

[Mister Skippy]

Copied from AtariHQ.com [atarihq.com]:

In brief, Atari was split-up in 1984 following the market crash. Time Warner kept the company's coin-op (arcade) division while selling off its home console and computer divisions to Jack Tramiel (former head of Commodore). Time Warner-owned Atari became Atari Games Corp. while the Tramiel-owned Atari became Atari Corp. Atari Games was sold to arcade giant Williams/Midway the early 90's, while Atari Corp. failed with its Jaguar and Lynx machines and merged in 1996 with JTS, a hard disk manufacturer. Finally, Hasbro came along in 1998 and purchased Atari Corp. for a mere $5 million, and and released a slew of revamped classic Atari hits for contemporary game machines and PCs. Hasbro fell on hard times and sold off its entire interactive group (including Atari) to French-owned Infogrames Entertainment. Similarly, Midway was affected by the downturn in the coin-op market and has exited from the arcade business -- which spelled the end of the Atari and Bally brand names in the arcades. Don't expect Infogrames-owned Atari to bring out a videogame machine anytime soon -- if not forever. With multinational conglomerates such as Sony and Microsoft vying for console supremacy, it's highly doubtful that there will be room for another contender...

Re:I'll buy one

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess other companies are coming out with re issues of older games.

http://www.colecovision.com/

and something more interesting I just found.

http://www.cgexpo.com/
Classic Gaming Expo

Countdown to CGE 2005 ~ August 20th & 21st ~ 347 days 04h 36m 11s

Classic Gaming Expo enters it's eighth year as the world's first and largest event paying tribute to the people, systems and games of yesteryear. The 2005 event guarantees to be the biggest and best ever, with lots of surprises to be announced as the show draws near. As always, CGE is open to the public and gamers of all ages are welcome!
Classic Gaming Expo 2005
Dates and Venue Announced

Thanks to the overwhelming response of our guests at CGE 2004, Classic Gaming Expo 2005 will return to the bay area, California on August 20th and 21st. The event will move closer to San Francisco and will be held in the convenient and exquisite Hyatt Regency in Burlingame. So convenient, in fact, that you won't need to rent a car if you're traveling from out-of-town. Just two miles from the San Francisco airport and offering shuttle service to both the airport and the BART public transportation hub (which will lead you right into scenic hotspots in downtown San Francisco), you'll love this location. We sure did - The Hyatt was our first choice for the 2004 event but did not have the dates we needed. Get your tickets early and take advantage of the early-bird rates from our registration page. We'll have pictures of the hotel and surrounding area available here in the next few weeks.
Atari 2600 Meltdown Prototype Available

Classic Gaming Expo is proud to present another treat for the gaming community. Over the CGE2k4 weekend, we had the pleasure of meeting up again with old friends, Ed Rotberg and Roger Hector. As an added bonus, we also met Howard Delman, ex-Atari employee and one of the three founders of Videa (along with Ed and Roger). We discussed "the old days" and they told us about an unreleased game programmed by David Ross of Videa that they still had. Turns out, that game is Meltdown for the Atari 2600, and it had been licensed to Fox who never published it. After a period of time, the rights lapsed and reverted to Videa. After some discussion, we were able to arrange for the ROM to be released for everyone in the community to enjoy, free of charge! Just our way of saying thank you to all who support us and our work. Thanks for another great show!

Remakes, Emulation, And Trouble.

[iamcf13]

One can be a purist and play the actual arcade game.

After 20 to 30-odd years of wear and tear and 'bit rot', that is becoming impossible.

Enter emulation and the (dubious?) success of MAME--'arcade in a PC'. The weak point is that the arcade game ROMs that 'power' it are (likely) still copyrighted and is illegal to have them unless you have the corresponding arcade game hardware.

So some arcade fans/programmers avoid all that and program 'remakes' that play (almost?) exactly like the originals.

The problem with that is that the copyright/trademark owners may/will come after you.

Case in point: Look at the way the 'Tetris' people crack down on all the tetris clone games that are out there--including the historic original IBM PC version that was first coded in Russia and was hosted at an informative 'Tetris History' website.

So all that is left is to get official, sanctioned emulated versions such as the 85 games-in-1 CD Atari is putting out in order to 'stay legal'.

In the end, isn't 'staying legal' what's it all about?

Re:Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

Gauntlet is an Atari Games arcade title. All arcade games starting in 1984 belong to the Atari Games Corporation (AGC). AGC was sold off to Namco, then Namco sold it back to Time Warner. Time Warner later merged it into all its interactive holdings and called it Time Warner Interactive (TWI). In 1996, Time Warner renamed TWI back to Atari Games and sold it Midway (formerly Bally Midway, Williams Midway, WMS Industries, etc.). This was over the objection of many Atarians online since many of us had backed (even if in spirit) Nolan Bushnell's attempt to repurchase the company he had founded (back in 1972 and sold to Warner Communications in 1976) from Time Warner. Atari Games became known as Midway Games West. The company office was shut down last year.

The Atari Inc. today is the descendent-in-spirit of the consumer video game and computer division which became known as Atari Corp. in 1984 after Warner sold it to the Tramiel family. In 1996, it was merged into hard drive failure JTS Industries. JTS went bankrupt and Hasbro Interactive acquired the rights and patents. Hasbro then sold out to Infogrames of France. Infogrames renamed itself Atari Inc. last year since "Atari" is such a better brand than Infogrames. Thus this new "Atari" is marketing this combo 2600/7800 back for the retro games industry.

Now, adding to the confusion is that if you actually purchase the arcade ROMs of the Atari arcade games, that is through a license of Midway/Atari Games. It doesn't matter if it dates back to Pong of 1972, that is Midway's property. There has yet to be a rights showdown between (Infogrames) Atari and Midway over the subject.

The Lynxpro