Atari Files For Bankruptcy 127
First time accepted submitter halls-of-valhalla writes "Atari was one of the very first video game companies, starting way back in 1972. However, this long-running name that brought us titles like Pong and Asteroids is having major financial issues. Atari's United States branches have filed for bankruptcy on Sunday. This bankruptcy is an attempt to separate themselves from their French parent which has quite a bit of debt. The plan is to split from the French parent and find a buyer to form a private company."
game over... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It sort-of is Atari (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not fair and too easy to say without some facts.
In the ST's heyday, they were visiting user groups to (as best they could)
to see what the users wanted to see in current/future products. Marketing, yes.
But there was a genuine concern, too.
Apple was in the same boat back then; probably worse. Guess what "saved" Apple?
Not S. Jobs, but PageMaker. If PageMaker had been developed for the ST, things
would be very different today.
Atari choose a very vertical market - hobby consumer oriented. Sadly, this was too risky
and Jack scared off all of the metal talent (they sure could've been NES and then some).
Apple went more horizontal and built appeal both for consumers and business and their
only genius was giving a mac to colleges.
CAPTCHA = refuel (alas, I fear it's too late even for that)
Re:Kickstart (Score:4, Insightful)
why should "we" do that? Can't "you" do it yourself?
Re:Atari has Reached a State of Atari (Score:5, Insightful)
The writing was on the wall when they started hitting their biggest fans with cease and decist orders [slashdot.org]. An Atari that valued its history for more what they could sell the rights might not be in this situation today.
Re:It sort-of is Atari (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple got their stuff into schools. IBM got their stuff into small businesses. Atari and Amiga got them into Toys'r'us. It's really that simple.
Re:It sort-of is Atari (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? Amigas were easily expandable, at least as much as 680x0 Apples. Big box Amigas (A2000, A3000 & A4000) had a Zorro bus which took graphics cards, serial cards, video editing (Video Toaster), etc. Small box Amigas (A500, A600, A1200) has similar expansion capabilities. A500&A1000 had a zorro 1 connector on the side, A1200 & A600 had the clockport. There were also the standard external parallel & serial ports available. There are even new expansion cards being manufactured & designed today (albeit in small quantities)
My A500 had a huge 80Mb SCSI hard drive.
My A4000 had a 24bit graphics card, serial card, 68060 processor with fast SCSI and lots of RAM (60Mb :-)