cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15718927
Atari® — one of the world’s most iconic consumer brands and interactive entertainment producers — announced today it has purchased the Intellivision brand and certain games from Intellivision Entertainment LLC. Intellivision Entertainment LLC will rebrand and continue its business of developing and distributing the Amico brand game console with a license from Atari to continue to distribute new versions of the Intellivision games on the Amico console.
Atari will seek to expand digital and physical distribution of legacy Intellivision games, potentially create new games, and explore brand and licensing opportunities as part of a long-term plan to create value from the Intellivision properties.
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what year is this
2024, where nostalgia sells
Obligatory repost:
Atari still exists?
Not really. Strap in.
Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976, before the 2600 was a thing. Warner eventually cracked them in half and sold the home-gizmo division to Jack Tramiel in 1984, after the 2600 was wrecked by shovelware. The remaining arcade division was sold to Williams in 1996.
The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers which all bombed. Their hail-Mary was the Jaguar. That’s how bad it got. Hasbro bought that wreck of a company, struggled, and spun it off into its own company, which bombed. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought that wreck of a company for reasons I’ve never understood. French studio Infogrames bought JTS for the Atari brand, wore it like a dead skin mask, made a few notable titles like Gauntlet Legends, got stuck in a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent, and bombed. Some middle-eastern tech-bro collective bought that wreck of a company for the Atari brand, spent a decade in vapor-ware hell, clunked out a weird PC nobody bought, and bombed.
The arcade division under Warner did quite well after 1984 and released a bunch of games you’ve probably heard of. Eventually “Time Warner Interactive” was purchased by Midway (which was owned by Bally (which was owned by Williams)) and released even more games you’ve probably heard of. That lasted until arcades stopped existing, at which point, it bombed. A decade later, Warner bought them again, through the purchase of Midway’s assets, but made no effort to re-use the brand. They just wanted Mortal Kombat.
This Atari - the one that recently released a vaguely-admirable home gizmo that’s basically a Raspberry Pi running Stella - is the finance-bro shell company that apparently found more money under a couch cushion. And they spent some of it buying back classic franchises? Bravo, I suppose. They’re still precariously close to being a bombed-out wreck of a company… again.
I swear, that logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. You know it kills companies. But they can’t help themselves. Seventh time’s the charm! So they put it on, and oh no, everything went wrong somehow. Who could have seen this coming?
“I can’t discern what’s important and not important among this tornado of fucking bullshit.”
- Civvie11
Calling the ATARI computers a “bomb” is a bit disingenuous. The C64 and Amiga computers were more popular, but ATARI was still selling theirs by the millions as a close second.
They’re not even second place in that sentence.
The Atari 8-bit line did okay at best, in a very wide field. The ST was as doomed as all other 68K systems. The Falcon was a brilliant machine - specifically, it was a NeXTstation. Their portables had it going on, but that market was teensy and they weren’t hot in it.
Admittedly their later computers did better than their later consoles, which, I mean, Christ. How do you release the 5200 without 2600 compatibility when the goddamn Colecovision has 2600 compatibility? Which snort proposed making the Lynx bigger?
Zombie buys corpse.
At this point, it’s not even a zombie.
The Atari shambling around today is Frankensteins Monster without the self-awareness, merely ripping parts off to replace when needed.
So does that mean they’re gonna be selling the Amico without the intellivision branding?
Their mothers must be very proud.
An anti-competative business move that’s forty years late.
why even is atari still around
The original company is not.
On February 13, 1996, Atari agreed to merge with JTS Inc., a short-lived maker of hard disk drives, in a reverse takeover to form JTS Corporation.[4][2] The reverse merger was completed on July 30, 1996.[1] Atari’s role in the new company largely became a holder for most of its properties. Most of Atari’s staff members were either dismissed or resigned, and its Atari Interactive division was quickly shut down,[27] with the remainder of its employees being relocated to JTS’s headquarters.[5][28] Consequently, the Atari name almost vanished from the consumer market.
On March 13, 1998, JTS Corporation sold the Atari name and assets to Hasbro Interactive for $5 million,[3] less than a fifth of what Warner Communications had paid 22 years earlier. The transaction primarily involved the brand and intellectual property rights, which Hasbro Interactive largely used as a brand name for retro game releases.[a][b]
On January 29, 2001, Hasbro Interactive was sold to Infogrames,[31] which renamed it Infogrames Interactive and then the Atari Interactive name in 2003. The present day Atari Interactive, through Atari SA, continues to hold and license all Atari trademarks as well as produce many new games, some based on Atari’s original properties, to this day.
