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."

Comments

Condolences

[dmanny]

That's a shame. I certainly enjoyed their early products.

Can anyone list off the remaining manufacturers in this market? How are they doing?

This is not all an end

[amigaluvr]

This might look like an end but I dont see it that way.

Just as the group have ended and it may be the last of the threads of atari, there is still the history. we still have what has been given us

Such as the old arcade games, and all their followon inspirations. 2D was never the same if they had not been.

Very sad, but Atari arcade never evolved

[totallygeek]

I love old video games. Maybe it is just because the new games are too difficult, require too much memory of secret moves or play areas, or are too jazzed about graphics than about game play. I think many at Atari felt the same way I do. The simplicity of game play for Atari arcade games was attractive for me. The fact that I had the Atari 2600 and most of the games in the game room were Atari made my arcade experience get named "playing Atari". However, most kids today wouldn't want to play Joust or Defender. If they did, Joust would be a first-person adventure in 3D where you would run around looking for a good bird to climb onto, while running from bad birds and flying dinosaurs. Defender would need to be a console game with 42 CDs where you are role-playing in your fight against mutant alien invasions. Atari's death is sad, but they never attempted to sell arcade games that satisfied the audience of today.

Re:Very sad, but Atari arcade never evolved

[len_harms]

I think the death of the video arcade has alot to do with consoles. Why play that game when you can play 50 at home? The video arcade was a place for people to hang out and eat pizza with friends. The hang outs are just different today. The video arcade was a fad, a LONG fad, but a fad. The machines were never ment to be 50 in one room where you played them. They were ment for bars, bowling allies, and fairs. Where there was not much else to do while waiting for something.

The video arcades are turning back INTO arcades. Where you do physical stuff. Most older arcades were of mechanical sorts, and gimicky things. It takes 30 seconds but the thing snorks your quarter and does something fancy, poof done. Want to see it again? Need another quarter.

Most kids do not even know these older games exist. I just bought the activision anthology for the ps2. Excelent 2600 set by the way. Put my friends kids in front of the thing and they played for HOURS. They could give a rip about the graphics. A couple of the games did suck. He said it. A few he kept playing because they didnt. Its that simple. The game sucks or it doesnt. Make to many sucky games and people will not play your stuff.

Another of my favorites is smashtv. NOT the best graphics but good enough, but the playability is there. Again showed this to my friends kids. I was playing on my laptop. They were playing the ps2. They stoped the game they were playing to watch me play the game. SmashTV is VERY cool compaired to the game they were playing. They saw that right away. Sucky games get tossed out for games that suck less.

The problem with the video arcade is money. To make a HUGE piece of gimicky software that stands out from the rest of gimicky games, costs alot of money. They just simply did not have enough people going to arcades to justify the money they were putting into it. Consoles on the other hand, you sell 40k in copies at 50 a pop, youve probably made your money back.

Now games are such HUGE productions they do not dare to stop making the game. In the 80's the games were simple enough that they could chuck the prototype if it was not good. As they have probably only put a couple of people on it and a few months of work. They could even chuck most of what they had and go back and redesign the thing, keeping what was good and leaving the rest. Now you have artists, testers, managers, project schedules, programmerS, hardware guys, and support staff. The credits in the newer games is very very very long. By the time they realize the game just sucks they are already cutting cds and making boxes!

My next game? Freelancer, finaly went gold. We shall see what they have been doing for FIVE years...

Bring Back the ST

[nurb432]

Hey they are doing it for Amiga and the C64, and if the 'other half' still have jobs.. they have a place to do it at..

Id buy a 'modernized' ST...

Re:Bring Back the ST

[JMZorko]

Damn, I first learned C, as well as 68000 assembly, on an Atari 1040ST, using the Metacomco (sp?) compiler back in 1986 (coming from an 1802-based RCA VIP, and 8-bit Atari XL, quite a jump!) It rocked. Later, I bought one of those too-cool SH204 shoebox 20MB hard drives, and then a bunch of MIDI stuff.

I still sort of miss those days -- I dunno, I like variety, and I was bummed when Commodore and Atari stopped producing Amigas and STs, respectively. I've been a Windows developer since 1990, and it's gotten so homogenous now that the only way it seemed fun again was to decide to focus more on cross-platform development. So, I started (and continue) learning and using Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris, POSIX APIs, etc.

Regards,

John

They ran out of inspiration long ago

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

All they have put out since their Atari classics are nothing more than lame rehashes of their old games -- which are available for FREE with MAME -- sold for the latest consoles and PCs for $50.

They have produced nothing of value since, and though it would have been shameful had they been aborted before they put out their classics, they were headed to the dustbin of history due to their lack of inspiration.

Hopefully, Midway will hire 30 young, ambitious, and talented programmers in their place.

Atari lives on forever, regardless

[MFInc2001]

The "legendary" (Nolan Bushnell) Atari has been gone for a long time already. However, the Atari we all grew up with and loved, and still love, shall go on forever in the form of MAME and Atari 2600 emulators.

--MFInc

LadyboyLovers.com

Are most arcade games violent?

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

20+ years ago, I used to love arcade games. That's why I love MAME. Lots of my old favorite games.

I've been to a couple arcades a few times in the last 10 years. A rare event for me. But I notice something. All of the games seem to be violent. Games involving fighting, shooting, etc.

My question is this: Are all arcade games violent nowdays? Or is it just that the two arcades I've seen are not representative of the arcade games available?

I'm not offended by the fact that violent games exist, nor that people play them. I've played a few myself. I just don't care for them. I liked the games of logic or skill like the old games. Shooting cartoon/imaginary spaceships, enemies, or some kind of graphic token isn't the same thing as shooting people. (And it's not that I wouldn't actually shoot people either, given the need.)

Did not go quietly?

[StuffYourReligion]

OK, so this is a rumor... not because I don't trust the source, but because I don't remember the exact story (yeah, so don't you trust me either). There are facts here, but I am not clear on them all.

My good friend's housemate worked at Midway, and I first heard the news last Tuesday. I believe it was actually the day before, on Feb. 3, that the cops arrived... before the announcement was even made. Apparently it wasn't your usual, quiet, lay-off. So the police were there and then everyone was told to leave immediately. "Don't grab your stuff, don't clean out your desks, just leave." Apparently they expected trouble for some reason, and I heard some things were indeed smashed by people on their way out.

They were going to let people back to gather their belongings later in the week... one at a time, escorted and supervised. If there were really just 30 employees there (says so in the article)... why would they have expected trouble? Why would they have thrown people out so rudely? This I don't know. I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time, but it seemed a bit strange to me, and the story made an impression on me most of all because it was Midway.

Makes me wonder what their corporate culture was like, and if most of the employees were wizened, old, maladjusted sociopaths who had lived so completely inside video games for the past years they might not react well to having themselves unplugged rather than just reset. My friend's housemate doesn't fit that description. Well, he's young anyway. *shrug*

No telling how many thousands of quarters went from my pockets into Midway machines back in the '80's ... but one of the most surprising things for me, hearing this story, was that Midway still even existed. I didn't know. I guess I haven't been in an arcade in a while.

atari 130xe

[Anonymous Coward]

I was still using an atari 130xe for school work through 1997, I even had/have a ploter (the old ink pen types). I loved it. I remember when we were looking for a new machine and looked at both Macs and PCs, in the spring due to the fact that I was going off to grad school, we bought a Dee-one system. My god that thing was nice, talk about a giant step in technology. My dad was an atari dealer in the 1980s so we had a lot of stuff to use up before he'd buy a "modern computer" it all still works and sometimes my brother still fires it up to play video games.

One hit wonder..

[Faeton]

I would like to throw the idea around that Atari was just a "one hit wonder" and really had no idea WTF it was doing and paid the consequence for its actions (and inactions). It was up to Nintendo to show everybody how it could and should be done.

Sure, Atari had its accomplices (Intellivision, Colleco) but Atari was the "big boy" but didn't have the maturity for a good business model or proper "hot or not" entertainment senses. By flooding the market with crap ass games (and letting companies they've licensed do that... ET anyone?) they spread such ill-will among the public that it took literally years before all the stars aligned and Nintendo showed the path.

So for them to last as long as they have, I don't think we should really mourn them, as they've been dead for the longest time. (though admittedly Stun Running did suck up a lot of my money). They've just been a souless zombie for the last 20 years.

The "other half" is gone too

[erturs]

I used to work at the "other half" of Atari (just plain Atari Corporation) and it was shut down nearly 7 years ago. A lot of the assets (including the Atari logo and rights to a bunch of games) were sold, and eventually made their way to Infogrames, but all of the employees were laid off and have long since been dispersed. A pity, really -- there were some good people and good technology at Atari.

Re:Infogrames & Hardware?

[badasscat]

Is Infogrames producing any hardware?

No. The "other half" of Atari ceased to exist long ago, and Infogrames owns only the IP - not the offices Atari used to be headquartered in, not the employees that used to work there. There is no more "Atari" as a functioning entity - not even as a division of Infogrames. It is simply a name they slap on what they consider their "high end" games - most of which to this point have actually been developed outside the company (and in fact were in development before the purchase of Atari's IP from Hasbro).

Infogrames does not even do a very good job of branding the Atari name. I work at a game publisher with a setup similar to what Infogrames has (central company with several different "labels") and we would never, ever put our parent company name anywhere on one of our labeled games - we keep the labels pure, and each has a distinct identity and to anyone on the outside probably feels like a separate company. Yet on "Atari" games these days all you generally see of Atari is the logo on the packaging and at startup - but there are still Infogrames logos and information plastered all over the place in the manuals, on the web sites, in the advertising, etc. It's very transparent that this is simply an Infogrames brand, and that the games are simply Infogrames games. There's no sense that the name "Atari" actually means anything - it doesn't, but they could at least do a better job at making it seem like it does.

As for hardware, it'd be cool to see an Atari-branded console again but a) it'll never happen, and b) if it does, this is not the same Atari. It'd be an Infogrames console in reality and everyone would know it.

It's a shame about Midway West too. This was not some one-hit wonder - anyone remember Marble Madness? Crystal Castles? A.P.B.? Paperboy? Not to mention Pong. Atari Games' list of arcade hits is nearly endless and goes back further than any other arcade manufacturer's. All the way up to the early 1990's, they were one of the dominant developers of arcade hardware and hit games.