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Infogrames Officially Changes Name To Atari

Posted by simoniker on from the cruising-round-los-angeles-astride-his-harley dept.

According to this story from Reuters via Yahoo News, Infogrames is now officially changing its name to Atari worldwide. The French publisher originally picked up the home rights to the Atari name after buying Hasbro Interactive in 2001, and had recently been rebranding much of its line-up (even PC RPGs) with the Atari logo alongside the Infogrames one. Lovable French ruffian and Atari CEO Bruno Bonnell will open the Nasdaq stock exchange on Wednesday morning to herald the new ATAR stock ticker symbol for the company.

6 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. No atari t-shirts? by PinkX · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So does this means that we won't be able to get any more unofficial Atari t-shirts with the Atari logo on it?

    On a side note, the slashdot guys couldn't have chosen an uglier color scheme for the games section of the site?

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  2. I'm okay with this. by pommaq · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, the Infogrames armadillo was cool and all, but that "Fuji" logo is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of graphic design ever.
    EVER.

  3. Trying to hide shame behind a proud name by Nice2Cats · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Infogrames just screwed up the release of Master of Orion 3 big time -- the game is a disaster and they still haven't released even the first code patch for it after, what now, two months? To say I now avoid products with that name is an understatement.

    Now, Atari -- I still have my Atari ST downstairs, and from time to time I plug it in, boot it and cry a little over the clean, crisp picture on the screen, the ease of use, and how unfair the world in general is. I could even do uucp with that machine, and if it only had had a MMU...and if only IBM hadn't bought MS DOS...if only pigs could fly...

    Shame, shame, shame on Infogrames for dragging Atari down into the muck with them. Of course, it won't help: The Brits tried renaming their continuous disaster of a nuclear plant "Windscale" to "Sellafield" (or vice versa, I keep forgetting) but that didn't fool people one bit.

    1. Re:Trying to hide shame behind a proud name by QuackQuack · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Now, Atari -- I still have my Atari ST downstairs, and from time to time I plug it in, boot it and cry a little over the clean, crisp picture on the screen, the ease of use, and how unfair the world in general is. I could even do uucp with that machine, and if it only had had a MMU...and if only IBM hadn't bought MS DOS...if only pigs could fly...

      Ease of use? I always found Atari's GEM implementation hopelessly frustrating, at least if you wanted to do anything more than launch programs.

      Still, if you like the ST, you might want to check out the aranym project, which aims to turn your PC into a modern Atari system. Many open source programs have been made to run under aranym, and many old ST programs will also work with it

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  4. A slap in the face... by NetDanzr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As a longtime Atari fan, I consider this to be a slap in the face. Having barely recovered from the slap caused by Spectrum Holobyte changing its name to Mindscape in 1995, now I need to suffer the gaming company with the worst tech support out there to appropriate the name Atari. Up to this day, Atari had a relatively good reputation, which now goes down the drain.

  5. Brand Recognition by Torvo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's less about the history of what has been produced under the Atari name & logo than it is about the relative recognize-ability of the logo and name. Yes, the Infogrames Armadillo (or "floating potato" as one of its incarnations was known) is reasonably well known amongst gamers, but the Atari name and logo are burned into the collective American consciousness as a video game brand. Infogrames has been spending huge buckets of dollars to get people to recognize and accept their branding (as well as spelling) for several years. Economically-speaking, it's a better dollar investment for them to adopt the Atari brand as their corporate identity -- people already know the name, know the logo and know how to pronounce it. (Four years ago, the Infogrames internal newsletter had a pronunciation guide of the corporate name so all the employees would know the "proper" way to say it -- "'info-GRAHAM', like the cracker!")