Slashdot Mirror
Atari Facing $291 Million Debt Claim From... Atari
An anonymous reader writes "Atari declared bankruptcy earlier this year, and part of that process involves selling off its property in order to pay as many entities holding its debt as possible. The latest round includes a $30 million claim from Atari's parent company in France, and a $261 million claim from another subsidiary of that parent company. The $30 million debt is secured (in other words, they get priority on whatever's left in the U.S. Atari's coffers), but the $261 million debt is not, so they'll have to wait in line with everybody else."
The article also lists some interesting sell-offs. The old Accolade brand got sold for $50,000, the Battlezone Franchise was sold to Rebellion Interactive for $566,500, and Wargaming World Limited purchased the Total Annihilation and Masters of Orion franchises. Stardock Systems, creators of Sins of a Solar Empire, picked up the rights to the Star Control franchise, which they intend to reboot. (Those who played it will recall that StarCon2 was the Best Game Ever. And it's been remade after the creators released the source code.)
new star control game?!
ANYONE?!
And who owns the old atari rights now days?
I think it's been a lot of spinoffs / buyouts over the years.
Atari owned the rights to make D&D based computer rpg's does that right get sold or returned to hasbro or is it under another branch of atari? If it is under this branch of atari what happens to the lawsuit against beam dog over the baldurs gate enhanced edition that is holding up the android and linux ports from being released.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Atari subsidiary company: $261 million
$30 million plus $261 million equals $291 million worth of debt owed to Atari entities
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A fun fact is that neither of the two Ataris suing each other here are in any reasonable sense the original Atari. First of all, the original company split in 1984 due to financial difficulties, into two companies: 1) Atari Games, which owned the rights to the classic game IP; and 2) Atari Computer, which took over making actual hardware.
Atari Games existed for a few year in the mid-'80s, but in the late '80s went defunct, getting bought up by Time Warner, which later became AOL, which later sold them to Midway Games, which was later acquired by Warner Bros. So it's basically a copyright holding company owned by some group of investors that is several degrees of separation removed from anyone who actually worked on an Atari game.
Atari Computer initially did some interesting stuff, mostly notably putting out the Atari ST, and later the Atari 7800. They sort of tanked in the late-'80s/early-'90s though, when the Atari Lynx and the Atari Jaguar both fell hugely short of expectations. This half of the company then met the same fate as Atari Games: it de-facto ceased to exist, except as IP that got sold around between various companies that never had anything to do with its products, in this case Hasbro and Infogrames. And now two parts of this half are suing each other.
The short version of the story is: Atari got split up in 1984, was defunct by 1993, and now two, of at least three, companies that own some kind of claim to the name "Atari" are suing each other, but none of them have anything to do with Atari, except insofar as they are leeches who've somehow ended up with the rights to exploit the trademark.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How much for the 3D Tic Tac Toe franchise?
So Stardock got the rights for Star Control but _not_ Master of Orion? I wonder if they were outbid, or decided to pass on it since they have Galactic Civilizations, their own decently reviewed and decently selling turn based 4x space game. They can always make GalCiv 3 not that they've passed on the opportunity to make MoO 3 (it's too bad no one ever made a third MoO game before) but even after all this time i think perhaps the MoO name might have given them some cachet (and thus sales) that GalCiv wouldn't get.
:)
As for Star Control, despite the issues with the original release of Elemental i have a moderate amount of faith in Stardock's ability to handle the game well, but they've demonstrated themselves to be both credible as a developer (Galactic Civilizations, Political/Corporate Machine) and as a publisher (Sins of a Solar Empire with Ironcald Games.) So i wonder if they're going to develop this game themselves, or farm it out to someone else. Someone like, i dunno, Toys for Bob?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I don't expect anything as good as MOO2. However, anything would be better than the buggy heap of crap that was MOO3. Personally, I would have loved to see Firaxis get that property.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
> "Stardock Systems, creators of Sins of a Solar Empire, picked up the rights to the Star Control franchise, which they intend to reboot."
Sins of a Solar Empire was created by Ironclad Games and published by Stardock. Stardock has developed their own games in the past, but let's give credit where credit is due: it belongs to Ironclad Games. It's sad that publishers get more credit and name recognition than developers these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire
to the Baldur's Gate franchise. Beamdog is basically in a holding pattern because Atari told them to cease and desist for now, which is holding up the Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate 2.
http://www.incgamers.com/2013/07/open-source-star-control-2-team-express-doubts-over-atari-ip-sale
Apparently they only got the trademark to the name "Star Control" and the copyright to Star Control 3. Unless the license the Star Control 2 content as well, we might get something very different with the Star Control name slapped on.
If they only made the in game ship combat control better and changed nothing else in MoO2, I would be happy to send them $50.