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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."
Midway's list of free games include:
T Co ntentServer?pagename=FutureTense/Apps/Xcelerate/Mi dway/Play
- Defender
- Joust
- Rampage
- Spy Hunter
- Robotron 2084
- Tapper
- Defender II
- Bubbles
- Satan's Hollow
- Sinistar
http://www.midway.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+F
pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Can anyone list off the remaining manufacturers in this market? How are they doing?
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
I'm actually surprised to hear they were still around at all. What are some recent titles they've produced? I don't play arcade games a lot so I really had no idea they were still producing for so long.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
Click here or here.
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...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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
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.)
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
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.
... 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.
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
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
You walk into an arcade and what do you see? 5 different racing games, a couple of gun games, maybe a dance game, and thats it!
WTF happened to arcade games?
Driven by focus groups, test marketed before they are mass produced, arcade games are yet another barometer of the bland tastes of the unwashed masses. Apparently the majority of people want more of the same, just slightly different. Look! Its a racing game that allows you to switch camera angles!! Look! Its a gun game where you shoot zombies instead of terrorists!!
Where is the sense of adventure?
I wish about 80% of consumers would simply die quietly in their sleep. No, I'm not bitter, just hopeful.
I spent much of my first meager paychecks at Aladdin's Castle in Saginaw, MI, playing Crystal Castles and Gauntlet. There was some later version of Asteroids which i really liked, and wouldn't mind sharing my apartment with one of the full-sized arcade machines. And probably most favorite was Tempest, which I have for the PC. There's a knob for sale which I believe works with it. Best game ever with the sound cranked way up!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
But not, you know, for the thirty people laid off.
Ah, slashdot.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
No, Atari died a long time ago, just after Nintendo stole the console crown. Since then, the only projects they've come up with have been consoles or handhelds that have either died slow, withering deaths or were just abandoned outright before they reached their prime. The most support these platforms ever received was after they dropped into absolesence by private 3rd parties coding for the hell of it.
No, what's really sad is that this company didn't die gracefully. Instead it's being chopped up bit by bit, one failure after another. That sad day is long past. Like they said about Spock, "He's dead already..."
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You walk into an arcade and what do you see? 5 different racing games, a couple of gun games, maybe a dance game, and thats it!
.50 to $2.00. Higher prices are also a contributing factor to lower demand, just accelerating the death spiral that the arcade industry is already in.
WTF happened to arcade games?
The arcade game market collapsed because of two factors: PC gaming and console gaming. Consumers like yourself found and purchased replacements that were in some ways adequate and in some ways superior to arcade games. The money that would have gone into arcade gamaing you spent on home gaming systems, instead.
Back in the late 70's and early 80's, the quantity and quality of arcade games was vastly superior to PC and console games; by the early 90's, the quantity of games was clearly with the home gaming market. And by the late 90's, the quality and features of home gaming had either equalled or exceeded arcade games. The only area where arcade games could really innovate was in elaborate designs like race cars and motorbikes and snowboards. I suspect that such arcade units cost more to build and to maintain, and along with the decreased revenue per unit, forced the arcade manufacturers to raise the cost per game to anywhere from
You want arcade games to survive? Then you (and 50 million of your closest friends) should stop buying PC and console games and start spending your money exclusively on arcade games.
Me? I prefer the cost, convenience and replayablity of home gaming. I was an arcade fanatic back in the early 80's, but these days, if I find myself in an arcade once a year, that's a lot.
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.
...My dad worked for Atari in the early-80s when the 2600 ruled the market. It was cool. Sometimes he'd take us down there on the weekends to play in the free arcade.
My dad's own take on Atari's demise: Their engineers were a bunch of coke addicts. Now, this could very well be just the circle of folks that my dad worked with.
Here's one for the urban legend file: There used to be a couch in the lobby of the building, and every night at midnight (according to my dad who sometimes worked the graveyard shift), the face of an old Indian chieftian used to appear in the fabric. It used to freak out all the security guards who had to sit there looking at it all night.
-- anthony
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.