It has been a long hard life for Atari, early pioneer of nearly everything gaming. Decades ago their three stripe logo was the national flag for gamers and it was the most crucial developer when gaming moved from the arcades into the living room. While Atari Inc. has gone through many iterations in its life, usually due to corporate wrangling, it basically began its life all the way back in 1972. Its founders Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell (of Chuck.E Cheese fame) created a cultural icon on just their second attempt at game development. That game was called Asteroids. The same year a fellow colleague created the first version of the tennis game Pong.
Then the Atari 2600 arrived in homes and everything changed. To date this may be Atari’s most successful product ever. What is absolutely certain is that this was the high point before the fall. A confused attempt in 1980 to get into home computers saw them lose to the Apple II. Even though it wasn’t a complete failure it was an early marker of what was to follow. Two years later they released the Atari 5200, a powerful machine by the days standard, but it never reached the success of the 2600 and was discontinued after just two years. It’s a pattern that’s repeated a few more times for Atari and one which culminated in the battle between Atari Lynx and a clunky off white block called the Gameboy. It is a battle that Atari lost. Though their product was of a higher quality (it already had a colour screen) Nintendo had successfully tapped into the popular zeitgeist and their console became synonymous with handheld entertainment.
Atari, the innovator, held out for some time after but by the mid nineties they had all but fallen out of the public eye. Sold on and manhandled by other companies it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that they resurfaced, this time modestly as a game publisher but with the intent to rebuild brand awareness. Splashdown was a middling game for the Playstation and Xbox that had at least commercial success, but the truth is that by 2005 the company was haemorrhaging money on a massive scale.
So here we are in 2014 and Atari have announced a new corporate strategy, a new focus for a new world. It’s no surprise that they’ll be utilising their back catalogue for iPhones and Androids, but the company has outlined a robust and steady move into several fields at once. As well as Mobile gaming there will be releases online and Atari Casinos. They also intend to move into licensing hardware, with the intention of catching the next big breakthrough. Bizarrely Chief Exec. Fred Chesnais even made a reference to appealing directly to LGBT, though he didn’t elaborate.
Atari has had a long and battered life. They are proof that early innovations don’t make long term success. However they are still an essential part of gaming culture. Though they may need to adapt in the new world and though their name is unlikely to ever have the prestige and awe that it once had, there is no harm having an industry figure that can trace its roots directly back to the conception of video game entertainment.
