Atari Acquires the Rights To Over 100 PC and Console Classics (engadget.com) 43
Atari has announced the acquisition of over 100 PC and console titles launched in the 1980s and 1990s from Accolade, Micropose and Infogrames. Engadget reports: Atari's ownership and catalogue have changed hands a bit since its heyday, so the purchase includes a homecoming for some of Atari's IPs. It's also adding Accolade's trademark to its vault. The newly Atari-owned games include the Demolition Racer series, Bubsy and Hardball. "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," Wade Rosen, Atari's CEO, said in a statement.
Atari is really gunning for a comeback, with a "multi-year effort to transform the company" and investments in IPs people care about (reimagined versions of Asteroids and Missile Command are reportedly in the works). [...] With its latest purchase, Atari says it will rerelease already existing games on modern consoles and create new adaptations of past storylines.
Atari is really gunning for a comeback, with a "multi-year effort to transform the company" and investments in IPs people care about (reimagined versions of Asteroids and Missile Command are reportedly in the works). [...] With its latest purchase, Atari says it will rerelease already existing games on modern consoles and create new adaptations of past storylines.
Give it up Atari (Score:2)
Re:Give it up Atari (Score:5, Interesting)
RE: retro gaming (Score:2)
Truthfully? Everyone I've encountered in the "retro gaming" scene really falls into one of two camps at this point. Either they're the ones interested in preserving/fixing up the original game cabinets and collecting them (so not really a market Atari or anyone else can make more money off of, from the perspective of holding rights to software titles), or they're just gamers who enjoy playing the classics now and then.
These people are primarily using emulators like MAME with ROMs they downloaded free, or b
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Or do both.
There are retro gamers who appreciate running original games on original hardware, but also realize that practically speaking, running the game on an emulator is far more convenient.
There are tons of PC games out there, and yes, it's fun to play on the original PC from the 90s, but people also know that PCs from the 90s are commanding way too much money especially for peripherals that once were popular, and old hardware is twitchy and balky and needs a lot of maintenance.
So hard drives are out, S
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most browsers now likely have the compute power necessary to emulate the old processors they ran on.
You'd be amazed at what you can do in the browser now. Emulating an old arcade game is nothing. Hell, you can emulate and old computer running an emulator for an old arcade game. Archive.org even has a few you can play online, iirc.
web browsers don't have the right input devices for them to work properly
That would depend on the game, I'd think. Using a joystick [mozilla.org] is no problem at all. I don't know about trackball or spinner controls, but I'm sure there's a way.
Re-monetizing abandonware (Score:3)
Now they can file infringement claims on all those $99 retro consoles.
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No one is paying to play your old games that are easily emulated in a web browser. No one is paying any amount of money to play the ones you bought like Bubsy.
"fans can look forward to seeing many of these games re-released in physical and digital formats..."
When they can brag about releasing these kinds of products in this format, it only helps confirm your point.
The FUCK is a physical release of a video game 40 years old? Are we talking 2600 cartridges, or 5.25" floppy discs that kids will hang on their wall next to the fucking vinyl...
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The FUCK is a physical release of a video game 40 years old? Are we talking 2600 cartridges, or 5.25" floppy discs that kids will hang on their wall next to the fucking vinyl...
Ussually, it means a clusterfuck like this:
Anounced in 2017, released (finnaly) in 2020. For a good recap of those hacylon 3~4 years, see here:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming... [arstechnica.com]
That little Atari micro console (Score:3)
I personally couldn't justify buying one because I'm just not doing that kind of hobbyist work anymore but i
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Was amazing and I don't understand why more people didn't buy it.
Because it got so many delays, and atari did so many sh177y things (like quareling and insulting users on reddit and other networks that pointed out the delays), that, by the time the console launched ~4 years after the anouncement they lost all the good will people may have had towards the product?
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
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If you don't like long delays don't pre-order product. It was a small company making a fairly complex product it's not a surprise it took a lot to get it off the ground.
Like I said the end result was still pretty good. Amazing if you consider the price you could get them on discount.
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The FUCK is a physical release of a video game 40 years old?
Probably a physical controller-sized device that has the game built into it which you either plug a HDMI cable into, Or that connects to a monitor wirelessly.
They've tried this sort of thing before with "Atari flashback" systems.. they are essentially All-In-One Plug in play blackbox gaming devices that don't use cartridges, but contained the Atari games on some ROM or flash pack built into the hardware.
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Does anyone actually want that? "Remasters" of old games invariably look worse than the originals. The generic 'modern' graphics are also much harder to 'read' with all the pointless glow effects, endless particles flying everywhere for no apparent reason, and unnecessary background and foreground distractions that just make it harder to see what's happening on the screen.
If you want a "remaster" just play any one of the thousands of indy clones. They are guaranteed to look just as awful and play just as
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remastering misses the point and the nostalgia.
What *I* personally want to play is Apple Trek--and *with* the purplish tint that happened before the rev 7 motherboards.
[it's the only Star Trek variant I know where you could trick the Klingons into firing torpedoes at one another!]
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If you happen to have an iPad there is Apple Treck in the App-Store, not sure if it runs on iPhones, though.
OTOH, regardless what computer you have, yo most likely find an Apple ][ emulator for it.
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I'm assuming an emulator, even though there's still a ][ or 2 in my garage. (they were being kept someday run a model railroad, but Arduino *finally* kicked the bus on the ][ off it's throne!).
But I want that emulator to have the quirks and all--the purple tint because the color burst wasn't suppressed on text lines until rev 7, the fuzziness of inverse video due to the televisions we used for displays back then, and so forth.
Not that I wouldn't feed that into the big screen on the living room, where I've
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are you fucking kidding me?
1) That would require work, the current "Atari" SA has to date never even attempted anything more than an emulator wrapped up in a "slick" front end, and they release them practically every year
2) they tried making updates to everything back in the 16 and 32 bit era which is why mostly the companies they are buying ended up dead in the first place
The most recent company on this list to actually make a new game is Infogrames, who already bought Atari, changed their name to Atari an
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I suspect this strategy involves eventually legal campaign geared towards making sure people CANNOT easily play the games in a browser. Sure, there exit emulators that can do it.. but they can take a page from big N's playbook about pursuing anyone distributing ROMs or providing web-based play of their games In coordination with their release of the Remade/Upgraded versions.
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Atari who? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "Atari" name has been bought and sold so many times, it's safe to say that whoever owns it now is a dozen or so degrees of separation away from the 80s, 2600-era "Atari." (Yes, this applies to a lot of well-known trademarks, e.g. Unix, but Atari's case is particularly extreme.) Who currently holds the brand name? Whoever does, it's not so much a "comeback" or the original Atari as it is a completely different entity wearing the skin of seven different companies all on top of each other.
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The "Atari" name has been bought and sold so many times, it's safe to say that whoever owns it now is a dozen or so degrees of separation away from the 80s, 2600-era "Atari." (Yes, this applies to a lot of well-known trademarks, e.g. Unix, but Atari's case is particularly extreme.) Who currently holds the brand name? Whoever does, it's not so much a "comeback" or the original Atari as it is a completely different entity wearing the skin of seven different companies all on top of each other.
OR, you can see it another way. Atari was dismembered, destroyed, obliterated, but just like Cell, Majin-Buu or the Terminator T-1000, the current owners are trying to re-assemble it. So they are slowly and painstakingly assembling past company IP, as well as creating newish-oldish-inspired IP.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming... [arstechnica.com]
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That is also true for a lot of other companies that are still the same company as when they started, eg. Microsoft and Apple. How many are left there who were there on day one?
Theseus' Company, anyone?
New Atari Games are nice (Score:2)
At long last (Score:2)
Just don't pull a Nintendo, Atari. (Score:1)
Teens might be anti-retro (Score:2)
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Pacman and Snake are still fairly popular with the kiddos.
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That's not to say Atari have to re-release these games exactly as they were back then. They might (and I hope they do), perhaps make a "game boy" type device that can play all of them as they were, but otherwise, "rebooting" a few of them with high res graphics and effects, maybe better sound might make them appealing to the more discerning teenagers - who, unlike us old farts at the time, don't have to put up with blocky 8 bit graphics because that's all the computer is capable of.
corporate cannibalism (Score:4, Insightful)
This is NOT your father's Atari. Nolan Bushnell is nowhere in sight, nor even is Jack Tramiel.
A company most people have never heard of purchased some of the IP of Atari long ago (like the name and trademark) in a typical act of one corporation picking over the corpse of another. Now THAT company is picking at the remains of other companies in the hope of milking a bit more money out of the bone marrow without actually doing anything like, well, INNOVATING and CREATING something.
It's disgusting, and frankly all of the copyrights on games that old SHOULD have expired and they all SHOULD be in the public domain. That was the original principle of copyright law: a LIMITED right to prevent copying without payment in exchange for eventually letting stuff become free to the public.
Turn Atari games into phone games (Score:2)
Story lines? (Score:2)
Wait... Forget everything I just said and remake Yar's Revenge.
MicroProse not Micropose (Score:2)
C'mon people, you can do better than that.
Also: My 6 year old loves the old games sometimes when he's in the mood. I wouldn't discount good games; a good game is a good game no matter how old it is. People still play Galaga and Pacman today, some even play Zork, and some play the old Zelda games. It's all good. Why all the hate?!