Atari Oddities!

[briwayjones]

Here is something I stumbled upon.

 

http://www.technologizer.com/tag/atari/

[CatPix]

Nice and interesting article.

I could bring some extra infos on the jukeboxes, tho only a little bit (but I'm not sure there is much to say about them).

 

In 1974, Atari acquired a large part of the French company Socodimex, which was importing and distributing electromechanical games and Seeburg jukebox

With this money, Socodimex acquired the Franco-Swiss company ElectroKicker, that manufactured the Jupiter jukeboxes (just reading that some were exported to the US... wow)

Socodimex was renamed/split as Atari Europe and reopenened the French jukebox factory, that produced Jupiter jukeboxes under the Atari-Europe brand.

 

You can note that the factory was closed and was under French Government "control" so one can imagine that ElectroKicker was doing poorly before Atari came in.

As to why Atari did that, I can only assume that Atari signed a deal with the French Government that allowed them to take ownership of ElectroKicker only if they reopened the factory for X years (a common thing here - Mattel would benefit from the same kind of deal later when they opened their European Intelliviion game programming division).

This was probably for 2 years, as in 1976, the jukebox division and factory were sold to Europe Electronique. It's noteworthy that Atari Jukeboxes were made and sold in 1976 and 1977, so mostly after Atari sold the factory. I can assume that the manufacturing of jukeboxes was lenghtly and the logotyping was long and expensive so they couldn't trash all the exisitng made parts

 

As to why they acquired this, I guess that Atari wanted simply to acquire the large network of adresses that Socodimex and ElectroKicker had, to send their Pong games in various bars and cafés.

 

Atari : made in France

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 17, 2017 by CatPix

[high voltage]

wish I had one of those.