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Atari Selling Studios To Avoid Bankruptcy
hammersuit writes "GameDaily Biz is reporting that Atari has put up five studios for sale in an effort to stave off bankruptcy once again. These include Shiny Studios (thought to be working on next-gen Earthworm Jim games) and Reflections (working on yet another sequel to the Driver series)."
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
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Atari has not made a game that I have any interest in playing in a very long time. The good days are in the past for Atari, and I think it's about time that it hits the old dusty trail. It will always live on fondly in our memories.
-BBSchaefer
Whoever gets Earthworm Jim better get it right.
I used to work at Atari for six years. Three years as a QA tester, three years as lead QA tester, and six years of whatever they made me do that didn't fall into first two categories. So I started off at Accolade, which was bought out by Infogrames, which became Infogrames North America after GT Interactive was bought (turning a private company into a public company with a reverse buyout), and became Atari when that intellectual property rights was picked up when Hasbro Interactive was bought. The French parent company was on a buying spree that often paid two to four times what each individual company was worth. But, hey, this was before the dotcoms went bust in 2000. Now all these studios of previously bought companies are being sold for pennies on the dollar because the stock price is now trading at less than a dollar when a lot of the financial guesswork was based on a $10/share and growing stock price back in 1999.
I left Atari nearly two years ago. From what I been hearing on the inside, production has moved from the west coast to New York to be with the corporate headquarters and closer to France, and QA may stay in Sunnyvale. There isn't much of a company left when you sell all your overpriced studios and the only products you have is the back catalog. I think someone will buy the back catalog, let the American shell company declare bankruptcy, and the French parent will be at square one with nothing to show for.
I would not buy IP rights to any of those franchises even if you paid me. If Atari is banking on selling those studios to keep from going under, I am afraid Atari's dead once again. Infogrames (Atari) was doing quite well for itself, this comes as a surprise to me.
Maybe instead of making money by selling studios, they should make money by selling games worth playing? Of course Infogrames should have thought of that before the buying spree mentioned by another poster.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They pissed off Epicgames, one of their most largest and successful developers, caused them to ditch Atari for Midway. They deserve to die for that reason alone.
That's a shame, DRIV3R was the B3ST GAM3 3V3R*
*lies
I, for one, would not be sad to see Atari go. They have personally cheesed me off recently on several occasions. The biggest and saddest of these was The Temple of Elemental Evil. The game had so much potential to be a very well done D&D 3.5 game, but was completely and totally fucked by Atari who pushed it out the door incomplete, stripped of solid content, and untested. For that alone I hope they die. More recently they've completely ignored the linux community in regards to Neverwinter Nights 2.
I will do a little dance the day they die.
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Maybe finally we can get some good D&D games seeing how Atari is pissing all over the license.
As a long time GTA fan, I was willing to give an impartial try to GTA-like games. I couldn't make it past the first mission in Driv3r, no matter how well I rode along with those police cars. It was the only game I returned to the video store early, out of frustration.
"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." - Shigeru Miyamoto
Circumcision is child abuse.
It's time to say goodbye to the remnants of the company that both gave birth to, dominated and destroyed the First Golden Era of Gaming.
ATARI LIES HERE
1972-2006
GAME OVER
http://www.mobygames.com/game/yars-revenge
...Atari employee's are being told "Atari."
I like the idea of Atari, but asside from games they had nothing to do with but distribution (Neverwinter Nights), they haven't seemed to DO much in the last..... four years or so. That is, unless you count Firaxis as Atari, in which case, Atari still rocks.
One million copies of Driv3r found buried in New Mexico desert...
Maybe they shouldn't have put protections that only annoy game buyers but not pirates.
Quite a few games I *bought*, I had to find a no-cd patch for them because they kept complaining I didn't put the CD in!
How many customers have they lost with that?
I thought they were long since a part of history...
Driver 1 was easily the best driving simulation game of its time. I have yet to see a game that surpases the physics algorythms of that game. The hackability was like a dream come true.
:P' (drool)
If the original hackers are still in Reflections are still there, I would buy just them and let them loose making the ultimate pure driving game.
To Reflections: Drop the stories and cut-scenes and shooting modes and make us the ultimate hackable cross platform MMO driving game. I guarantee millions of sales globally. Make it happen number one!
Favorate Driver 1 Hack (Mac OSX):
Survival mode + High Park in San Fransisco +
Sweet Red Jaguar + Really Pissed off cops ==
JsD
You're correct. The "Atari" they're referring to here is not the Atari we all remember from our childhood. That Atari went out of business years ago. The French company Infogrames (one of the largest publishers, though I believe they are behind EA) bought all the rights to the Atari name several years ago, and then they changed their name to "Atari". So to be more accurate, the title should be "Infogrames selling studios to avoid bankruptcy".
They could merge with a hard drive manufacturer and then.. I forget what comes next.
In the buying spree of 1999-2000 when Infogrames grabbed up Ocean, Gremlin, Accolade, GTI, and Hasbro Interactive, fueled by a $300 million interest-free loan from the French Government, a third-rate European game company headed up by a charismatic self-proclaimed "visionary" with a degree in chemical engineering, thought they could take on EA. They made quite a few very expensive mistakes. One was dictated by the times -- in the dot com bubble, everything was more expensive, including IP. The second was in their purchase of GTI, the executive staff there negotiated 5-year continuing employment contracts. Anyone familiar with the history of the industry knows that, at the time, GTI was being driven into the ground by those executives. Infogrames saddled themselves with patently unsuccessful managers who then proceeded to grind Atari into nothing, lining their pockets along the way. The final round of mistakes happened after the former GTI crew left and Atari hired former Acclaim execs to run the company. Acclaim, for the unitiated, went bankrupt a few years ago.
Atari died of mismanagement, plain and simple. I'm just surprised it took so damn long.