Matt_B

Yeah, but nobody wants to be a marketing genius who's only known for being a marketing genius, especially if they're ignorant about technology and arrogant towards their staff. I mean, that's basically Ray Kassar, and who'd want to be him? 🙂

Jobs is a truly iconic figure for people who style themselves as technological geniuses but don't know the first thing about technology.

To be fair, you'd see similar figures for Atari's Recharged series and they're pretty good games. Concurrent player count isn't the best of metrics for judging the success of indie games that you can be done with in under an hour. For games without much of an install base, the more reliable method would be the Boxleiter one, i.e. multiply the number of Steam user reviews by 40. That puts most of the Recharged games into the thousands, where the Amico leftovers would be in the low hundreds. Steam truly is platform where mediocre indie games go to die in obscurity.

I'm guessing that it's probably not going to make him a lot in royalties, but wasn't Tommy paying himself $100K a year for all the stuff that it turns out that he wasn't actually doing?

When downloading some stock music gets you three credits on a video game, I'm clearly in the wrong line of work.

Not seriously. It's just a joke. As before, I'm in my 50s too.

The other possibility is that he wrote the blurb back in the days when people still thought that there was a chance of the console coming out and Tommy hadn't changed his name by deed poll to Muddy McMudface. It's certainly been sitting around mostly finished but for a long time, and only the barest amount of effort appears to have gone into porting it and getting it released.

You've got to hand it to Johnny. I don't think anyone's got as much out of the VCS as he has.

Yeah, I'd like to see something like Atari 50 but with third party content, so Atari Games, Activision, Namco, the works. Still, the barrier to this is that everyone's got to get paid enough to make it worth their while and, even if Atari are starting to shuffle back into profitability, I'm not sure if sales are quite that good yet.

I'm glad someone gets it.

I'm in my 50s. I will make sure to caption my future posts on this subject with smilies, just so you can get the jokes. 🙂

Yes, Atari definitely own those six games.🙂 I'm just saying that there's a much longer list of notable games that they're associated with but don't own. The association with Pac Man and Space Invaders is correct, even, because Atari published the VCS versions of those games alongside many other arcade ports like Defender, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, and so on. These games were, generally speaking, more popular than the Atari-owned titles were back in the day too. Also, let's not forget all the film licenses such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Halloween and, of course, E.T. that were games that they made but don't own. The distinction between Atari Corp and Atari Games wasn't that obvious at the time either, because the former published a lot of the latter's games when it came to home computer and console ports. If you'd only ever played Xybots on the Lynx, you wouldn't necessarily even know of it as an arcade game, for instance. It does, of course, mean that Atari owns none of those games now. Oh, and could you tell me why Atari don't own Battlezone any more without looking it up? Even if you can, most people aren't going to do that.

That's a common problem with a lot of other games too. Just have a look at all the "why isn't this game on Atari 50?" discussions across the internet. I'd even go so far as to say that most of the games that people would readily associate with the Atari brand either aren't owned by them, or never even were. As well as all the post-split arcade games, there are all the license deals, the localized Japanese games, everything that got flogged off in bankruptcy fire sales, plus a tendency to forget that Activision and Imagic were different companies. Attempting to reacquire, or just plain acquire for the first time, is obviously part of the company strategy now. I'd suspect that most of them won't come as cheap as Bubsy though.

They could have just cut to the chase and had one bar for the under 40s and one for the over. You're either old enough to remember the glory days of 1977-1982 or you're not. In 2010, Atari were still a mildly relevant brand in game publishing with franchises like Unreal Tournament, Neverwinter Nights and Civilization in their recent history. It's only going to worse after the lost decade that was the 2010s. The over 40s of 2010 are now well into their 50s. They're getting to the point where relevant markets to branch into would be retirement homes and incontinence products.

They're doing good work in highlighting the absurdity of 100% completionism.

Someone must be hating on it on an internet forum. I've heard that can really throw out production schedules for hardware. 🙂

You're talking about the company that just remade a nine year old game that already ran on their latest consoles. In Sony's eyes, ten years old is practically retro. As for Microsoft, I guess this is their character showreel. 🙂

Yeah, when it started out, I thought it was going to be Ouya 2.0. The hardware would come out, fail to sell, and get sold off at deep discounts to be modded as a slightly upmarket alternative to a Raspberry Pi. Meanwhile, the software sales would be miserable and everything even vaguely worthwhile would end up being ported to other platforms. That turned out to be an overly generous prediction, although I got that last bit right. 🙂

The thing about celebrities is that, whatever they are to you, you're a complete stranger to them. So, it's probably for the best if you treat them like that and leave them alone. One thing I'll say for Tommy is that he was pretty successful and making his fans feel as though he wasn't a complete stranger, but a friend. At least that's my rationale for how he made so many of them follow him down the rabbit hole.

I don't think they know either. https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Yeah, I'd think that if Atari want a new mascot they're going to have to have a hit game with an identifiable character that they actually own, rather than through a licensing agreement. Bentley Bear only holds the position by default because he's the last time that happened.

Yeah, I'd expect that Evercade ports of the Recharged games would be scuppered by the lack of GPU power, RAM and buyer interest. Even if possible, it'd be a lot of work for maybe five hundred extra sales. That's probably about what they're getting on the VCS too, but that's a much easier port because it's basically a PC, and it's in Atari's interest to keep the platform mildly relevant. The LRG release was just four games across two cartridges or discs (they also did PS4/5) so less than half the games in the series now. They're shipping as we speak, so you might soon be able to buy them from scalpers. Holding on for the retail release doesn't seem like a bad idea.

I really love Nightdive's work on the Quake remasters. They're of benchmark quality and to have that level of talent at Atari's disposal opens up huge possibilities. Purchasing a games studio is always a bit of a double-edge sword though. Just look at what happened to most of the ones Microsoft picked up in the 2000s; most of them are now closed or were sold on to other owners and Rare is about the only one still going for them. It's clearly something that's got to be carefully managed.

Yeah, I don't buy the excuse that Mike got conned by two different hardware guys on the RetroVGS and the Chameleon. He was either in on the deception or so utterly clueless about the technology involved that he'd have barely known what a games console looked like. Either way, it'd have been an utter disaster if they had received any money. As for Tommy, while there's still dirt, people will keep digging. If he wants to put the Amico fiasco behind him, he could do a considerably better job of walking away than having his name still plastered over everything that's associated with it.

Thanks. I stand corrected. The confusion arises mostly because of this line in Atari's FY23 financial report: "Atari announced the termination of all license agreements with ICICB Group and its subsidiaries (“ICICB”). The license agreements between Atari and ICICB, including the Atari Chain license (the “Joint Venture”) and the related licenses including hotel and casino licenses, have been terminated effective April 18, 2022." I didn't realize until now that there were two hotel deals. Holy moley!