ATARI ACQUIRES INTELLIVISION BRAND
atari.com
Purchase of Intellivision Trademarks and Games Unites Competing Brands from the '70s and '80s Atari® — one of the world's most iconic consumer brands and interactive entertainment producers — announced today it has purchased the Intellivision brand and certain games from Intellivision Entertainment LLC.  Intellivision

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15718927

Atari® — one of the world’s most iconic consumer brands and interactive entertainment producers — announced today it has purchased the Intellivision brand and certain games from Intellivision Entertainment LLC. Intellivision Entertainment LLC will rebrand and continue its business of developing and distributing the Amico brand game console with a license from Atari to continue to distribute new versions of the Intellivision games on the Amico console.

Atari will seek to expand digital and physical distribution of legacy Intellivision games, potentially create new games, and explore brand and licensing opportunities as part of a long-term plan to create value from the Intellivision properties.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    13·
    5 months ago

    Obligatory repost:

    Atari still exists?

    Not really. Strap in.

    Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976, before the 2600 was a thing. Warner eventually 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 for reasons I’ve never understood. French studio Infogrames bought JTS for the Atari brand, wore it like a dead skin mask, made a few notable titles like Gauntlet Legends, 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?

    • SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      Calling the ATARI computers a “bomb” is a bit disingenuous. The C64 and Amiga computers were more popular, but ATARI was still selling theirs by the millions as a close second.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        They’re not even second place in that sentence.

        The Atari 8-bit line did okay at best, in a very wide field. The ST was as doomed as all other 68K systems. The Falcon was a brilliant machine - specifically, it was a NeXTstation. Their portables had it going on, but that market was teensy and they weren’t hot in it.

        Admittedly their later computers did better than their later consoles, which, I mean, Christ. How do you release the 5200 without 2600 compatibility when the goddamn Colecovision has 2600 compatibility? Which snort proposed making the Lynx bigger?