At the start of the new Millennium, Atari seemed a little lost. During the previous decade, it had exited the arcade, computer and console markets, fields it had helped to define, and under the ownership of Hasbro it appeared that Atari would become little more than a nostalgia brand, applied exclusively to retro remakes like the PlayStation editions of Pong and Centipede. Hasbro wasn’t doing well in the games market though, and by 2001 it was looking to off-load its interactive entertainment division – a move which would result in a return to prominence for the Atari brand.
The buyer was the French publisher Infogrames, which was snapping up companies left and right in an ambitious attempt to become the biggest games company in the world. It had already swallowed up Ocean Software, Gremlin Interactive, Accolade and GT Interactive, and its latest purchase gave it the rights to both the Microprose and Atari brands, and their respective software libraries. Despite being the third-biggest game publisher in the world by 2002, after only EA and Vivendi, Infogrames wasn’t a name that had a great deal of prestige, so after testing the waters with a trio of Atari-branded extreme sports games in 2002, the company decided to fully rebrand as Atari in 2003.
“PEOPLE HAVE MEMORIES AND EMOTIONS TIED TO ATARI THAT PREDATE ME BY DECADES”
WADE ROSEN
The result was that the famous logo and just to stave off bankruptcy. It also decided to sell off all of its internal development studios, including Shiny Entertainment – a company it had acquired for $47 million in 2002.
