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Atari Is Jumping on the Crypto Bandwagon (bloomberg.com)
Atari has announced plans to create a company token and potentially develop cryptocurrency-based casino platforms. The company, commonly associated with arcade classics such as Asteroids, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Pong, seems to believe new life can be breathed into the casino industry through cryptocurrency. From a report: "Blockchain technology is poised to take a very important place in our environment and to transform, if not revolutionize, the current economic ecosystem, especially in the areas of the video game industry and online transactions," Atari Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Frederic Chesnais said in the statement. "Our aim is to take strategic positions with a limited cash risk, in order to best create value with the assets and the Atari brand."
Here on Slashdot, could be please not use "crypto" as an abbreviation for cryptocurrency? We lost the war for "hacker", and we may lose the war for "crypto", but can we at least not be idiots in Slashdot headlines?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not every day that people are willing to give you millions of dollars in real money in exchange for tokens of fake money.
I'm shouting uselessly into the void, I realize, but I really wish people wouldn't redefine "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency", rather than "cryptography", which is what it has meant for decades.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
While the name "Atari" may be associated with arcade classics, the company Atari really has no connection whatsoever with that old organization besides the name.
After countless buyouts, takeovers, and bankruptcies I think it would be very difficult to trace any continuity back to the Golden Years.
Please stop it.
There is no Atari anymore.
A more correct headline would be "Company who bought Atari trademark is now getting into crypto-currency". (But, of course, nobody would care about that at all...)
Asteroids and Pong were by Atari.
Pac-Man was by Namco. They actually bailed out Atari by purchasing Atari Japan (and its debts) in the 1970s. Atari might have gone bankrupt before it ever became a household name if not for Namco. They also became part-owner of Atari in the late 1980s when Atari failed and was split, but Pac-Man was developed all on their own in 1980.
Space Invaders was by Taito. Which is now a subsidiary of Square Enix (of Final Fantasy fame).
Atari licensed rights to Pac-Man and Space Invaders to make home console versions, but they weren't involved with the arcade classic versions. This may seem like esoteric nit picking, but misattributions like this are how the public got the misconception that Bill Gates invented the Internet, or Apple invented the smartphone. Let's nip it in the bud.
Especially because Atari was the first console maker to jump on the actual crypto bandwagon, using code signing in the Atari 7800 ProSystem firmware.
Nintendo's competing solution was a pseudorandom number generator called 10NES that ran on a pair of matching microcontrollers, one in the console and one in the game cartridge, not interacting with the game program itself in any way other than to trigger release from reset. True, synchronized PRNGs could be considered a stream cipher, but when viewed as such, the plaintext is a constant stream of zeroes.