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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)."
Goodbye, Atari. We will miss you.
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.
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
"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." - Shigeru Miyamoto
Circumcision is child abuse.
Neverwinter Nights 2 is very much a game people want to play. Selling a studio is instant; making a hit game takes a bit of time. They're doing all this now to try and make it until they can release some of the stuff in the pipeline.
I personally don't care if it's Atari that publishes it or not (Obsidian isn't part of them anyways), but NWN2 better be released . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
But the original Atari died in about 1998 (home computing) and 2003 (arcade bit), the current Atari is Infrogrames in disguise.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10