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Atari Arcade Division Closes
Bill Kendrick writes "Today Midway dropped the axe on 'Midway Games West' (Formerly Atari Games Corporation). The remaining 30 people working there have been
laid off. The other half of Atari, who went on to make the Atari ST line of computers and Jaguar and Lynx game systems, is still alive and kicking, as part of Infogrames.
Still, it's a sad day for gamers."
Atari's passing is a real blow to the industry, even if they haven't made too many games lately.
For starters, Atari was the first successful arcade game company. For a little while, if you talked about videogames you meant Atari.
Second, throughout their entire lifespan, Atari produced original games. They always tried new things. They always looked for something different to do. Of all the other companies in the industry, there are precious few who can claim that. Nintendo certainly does it. Some of Sega's splinter development teams do it. Blizzard does it by copying lesser-known games (like Dune II and Rogue). Maxis does it once in a while when they aren't releasing The Sims add-on packs. Who doesn't do it? Namco, Capcom, Square, EA, Microsoft, and Infogrammes (including their "Atari" devision).
By the way: a previous comment stated that Defender, Stargate/Defender II., Joust, Robotron, Rampage, Tapper and Sinistar were Midway games. They are, but they are not Atari games.
Here are the most noteworthy Atari arcade releases, to my mind:
Pong
Asteroids (and Asteroids Deluxe)
Missile Command
Centipede (and Milipede)
Tempest (tied with William's Robotron: 2084 for the title of Twitchiest Game)
Star Wars (still the best of all the many Star Wars videogames!)
Crystal Castles
Marble Madness
I, Robot (the very first 3D polygonal game)
Hard Drivin' (the first successful 3D polygonal game) (also Race Drivin')
S.T.U.N. Runner
720 Degrees
Gauntlet (the game that invented the idea of joining in any time, and an incredible amount of fun) (and Gauntlet II)
Toobin'
KLAX
Tetris (arcade)
Rampart (the best-designed game ever made)
San Franscisco Rush (which is actually like a high-tech update of Hard Drivin')
Gauntlet Legends (pioneering with characters that persist between games) (and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy)
So, unlike what a previous correspondent said, Atari was not a one-hit wonder.
What most of these games have in common is the creation of an entirely new kind of game. They didn't produce endless strings of one-on-one fighting games like some companies I could name. It's true that a few games were released that didn't measure up to these (California Speed stands out in my mind), but no other game company has this track record of innovation, not even Nintendo (and hey, I love Nintendo).
In the early days of the arcade game industry there were few precedents, so you couldn't mindlessly ape someone else. Atari stood out then. But even in their later years, they still tried new, nutty things. That era gave us Rampart, which, I'm not kidding, is an amazing design and should be studied, in an era when side-scrolling things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the rage. They were just about the only reason for thinking person to enter arcades for a while.
To think that Ed Logg may have been escorted off the premises by police! Man, that just makes my blood boil.