There is no Atari. A trading name isn’t a company.
A brief history of that clusterfuck, which seems to shift each time I look into it:
Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976, before the 2600 was a thing. Warner cracked them in half and sold the home-gizmo division to Jack Tramiel in 1984, after the 2600 was wrecked by shovelware. The remaining arcade division was sold to Williams in 1996.
The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers which all bombed. Their hail-Mary was the Jaguar. That's how bad it got. Hasbro bought that wreck of a company, struggled, and spun it off into its own company, which bombed. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought that wreck of a company. French studio Infogrames bought JTS for the Atari brand, wore it like a dead skin mask, published Unreal for a hot minute, got stuck in a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent, and bombed. Some middle-eastern tech-bro collective bought that wreck of a company for the Atari brand, spent a decade in vapor-ware hell, clunked out a weird PC nobody bought, and bombed.
The arcade division under Warner did quite well after 1984 and released a bunch of games you've probably heard of. Eventually "Time Warner Interactive" was purchased by Midway (which was owned by Bally (which was owned by Williams)) and released even more games you've probably heard of. That lasted until arcades stopped existing, at which point, it bombed. A decade later, Warner bought them again, through the purchase of Midway's assets, but made no effort to re-use the brand. They just wanted Mortal Kombat.
This Atari - the one that recently released a vaguely-admirable home gizmo that's basically a Raspberry Pi running Stella - is the finance-bro shell company that apparently found more money under a couch cushion. And they spent some of it buying back classic franchises? Bravo, I suppose. They're still precariously close to being a bombed-out wreck of a company... again.
I swear, that logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. You know it kills companies. But they can't help themselves. Seventh time's the charm! So they put it on, and oh no, everything went wrong somehow. Who could have seen this coming?
And then there's intellivision
Nah, Intellivision died like regular. Mattel spun off INTV, which later made a few NES games, which meant anti-competitive licensing deals precluded making their own console. By 1991 they had no money. Late 90s to mid-2010s, the rights get passed around for assorted retro compilations and a decent-looking micro-console.
It only gets stupid once Tommy Tallarico bought the rights in 2018 and - for starters - decided to make each controller a weird little tablet unto itself.
There is no Atari. A trading name isn’t a company.
A brief history of that clusterfuck, which seems to shift each time I look into it:
Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976, before the 2600 was a thing. Warner cracked them in half and sold the home-gizmo division to Jack Tramiel in 1984, after the 2600 was wrecked by shovelware. The remaining arcade division was sold to Williams in 1996.
The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers which all bombed. Their hail-Mary was the Jaguar. That's how bad it got. Hasbro bought that wreck of a company, struggled, and spun it off into its own company, which bombed. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought that wreck of a company. French studio Infogrames bought JTS for the Atari brand, wore it like a dead skin mask, published Unreal for a hot minute, got stuck in a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent, and bombed. Some middle-eastern tech-bro collective bought that wreck of a company for the Atari brand, spent a decade in vapor-ware hell, clunked out a weird PC nobody bought, and bombed.
The arcade division under Warner did quite well after 1984 and released a bunch of games you've probably heard of. Eventually "Time Warner Interactive" was purchased by Midway (which was owned by Bally (which was owned by Williams)) and released even more games you've probably heard of. That lasted until arcades stopped existing, at which point, it bombed. A decade later, Warner bought them again, through the purchase of Midway's assets, but made no effort to re-use the brand. They just wanted Mortal Kombat.
This Atari - the one that recently released a vaguely-admirable home gizmo that's basically a Raspberry Pi running Stella - is the finance-bro shell company that apparently found more money under a couch cushion. And they spent some of it buying back classic franchises? Bravo, I suppose. They're still precariously close to being a bombed-out wreck of a company... again.
I swear, that logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. You know it kills companies. But they can't help themselves. Seventh time's the charm! So they put it on, and oh no, everything went wrong somehow. Who could have seen this coming?
And then there's intellivision
Nah, Intellivision died like regular. Mattel spun off INTV, which later made a few NES games, which meant anti-competitive licensing deals precluded making their own console. By 1991 they had no money. Late 90s to mid-2010s, the rights get passed around for assorted retro compilations and a decent-looking micro-console.
It only gets stupid once Tommy Tallarico bought the rights in 2018 and - for starters - decided to make each controller a weird little tablet unto itself.