The true face of Atari (mini rant)

The company currently known as "Atari" has no relation to the Atari that made the Atari video game consoles. It's not the company that made all those arcade games in the 70s and 80s.

It's just the French video game company Infogrames, but they bought the Atari name and trademarks. They don't even own all of Atari's IP. Any game that was developed by Atari's coin op division is currently owned by Warner Brothers, not Infogrames (which deigns to call itself "Atari, SA"). This includes but is not limited to arcade classics like Gauntlet, Paperboy, Marble Madness, 720°, and Klax. All owned by Warner Brothers under the Midway name.

I don't know why this irks me so much that Infogrames calls itself "Atari", but it just feels disingenuous of them to do so because they're NOT the same company. Atari is actually dead. It's BEEN dead since 1996, though it began to die in 1984 when it got split into two companies Atari Games (coin-op division) and Atari Corporation (home console division). Both divisions were bought up by someone else in 1996. Both divisions were owned by Warner Brothers up to 1996, then JTS bought Atari Corp and Midway bought Atari Games. In 2009, Warner Brothers bought Midway, returning the coin-op division to them.

The journey is a lot more convoluted than that, because it involves WMS (Williams Manufacturing Company, which was the parent company to Midway), Hasbro, and also Namco got involved at one point, buying SOME of the coin op games from Warner early on but then later selling it back to Warner...

Point is this... Atari, SA is not Atari. The Atari you see releasing games today is not Atari. It's just Infogrames performing Atari cosplay so the industry can pretend that Atari still exists.