AtariAge + Atari Q&A

[Crazy Climber]

5 hours ago, thanatos said:

 

but now there are 30+ more pages??  Holy crap I'm never going to catch up!

 

Yeah man, Ive been having to read this thing an hour every morning, an hour every night just to stay current. I think the last time I was this glued to the forums was when the guy found the boxed Air Raid 😄 

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, JPF997 said:

"Small gaming magazine" could you perhaps be referring to gamekult, just asking.

Wow, that's weird. I happen to write for Gamekult, but I said "a small retrogaming website", so I was referring to Le Mag MO5.COM (the link is under my profile pic).

 

Anyway, the Atari ST happens to be my first video game system, but I'm not very nostalgic of it to be honest. The games I liked the most were ports of arcade Japanese games, and most of them (if not all) got better ports elsewhere. I just didn't know and have any better at the time. And btw a lot of Ocean games were licensed, so that makes it even more difficult to release them nowadays.

I could see a few games that could be rereleased like Dungeon Master or Hostages (the latter was indeed rereleased on Steam iirc), but even though a compilation or pnp system may not cost a lot to produce, I really doubt it will make any money. I'm pretty sure Amiga Mini owners would have not bought one if it wasn't possible to use your own disk images for instance. Amiga Mini's included games belong to the same 2, maybe 3 publishers (Team17, Bitmap Brothers). And yes, those publishers released games on the ST, but they were inferior versions.

[Raiu]

On 9/11/2023 at 12:36 AM, Matt_B said:

The problem is that technology doesn't always make things smaller, faster and cheaper in an inexorable progression. Sometimes they just become obsolete and you can't get them any more.

 

To cut a long story short, the era of cheap ASIC plug-n-plays is over, and the modern equivalent of a Flashback 2 would be an FPGA-based device that'd have to sell for around six times the price. Well, either that or an ARM emulation device, which is what we're getting.

Ah, so it's basically the enshittification of technology.  "Hey, guys, I know how we can make more money!  Let's make something that's worse and charge more for it!" "Great plan!  Also, you're fired so we don't have to pay you for your idea!"

 

... sometimes I hate the 2020s.

[Tickled_Pink]

2 hours ago, JPF997 said:

I've found the reason for this confusion, in 2022 Atari renewed the Ocean software trademark, it seems like the actual company ( that once upon a time was also know as Atari UK) is owned by Bandai Namco but the rights to the Ocean name and a lot of the old ip's are still owned by Atari SA, I know Atari's corporate history can be very confusing some times ( especially because of everything that went down in the late 2000s which inevitably led to the 2013 bankruptcy).

What you suggest about Atari selling Ocean but retaining the rights to the trademark doesn't make sense. You'd think that they'd buy the whole thing. As Atari needed the money back then, there was little incentive for them to withhold anything from the deal. Hell, they even sold off some of their own IP, such as Battlezone IIRC. I can't find the trademark registration in either the US or UK databases.

[+jgkspsx]

7 hours ago, thanatos said:

now there are 30+ more pages??  Holy crap I'm never going to catch up!

[+jgkspsx]

5 minutes ago, Tickled_Pink said:

Hell, they even sold off some of their own IP, such as Battlezone IIRC.

They went bankrupt and were legally obligated by the Chapter 11 process to make their assets available for purchase. Rebellion (who were badly treated by TramielAtari as Jaguar developers) bought BattleZone and show no sign of considering selling it back.

[marakatti]

22 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

When they see ST games running side by side with Amiga versions, even ST ports on the Amiga, it's viewed as the poor man's Amiga. 

 

It really needed a far stronger line up of Triple A titles, to set it aside from it's competition. 

 

When people see a lot of 8-bit conversions to it, likes of I, Ball, Uridium etc with horrendous scrolling, poor sound fx, they struggle to take it seriously as a 16-bit gaming platform. 

Why not let ST fans decide that? The games reflect their time and place. It's natural that they don't look as attractive today, but does ZX Spectrum or 2600 games? No and they still can playable and fun if programmed well. Retro gaming is not all about eye candy.

 

According to professional journalists up to summer 1989 Amiga games were rarely seen that much superior, because it was playability that counted. I've compiled hundreds of review scores for that subject. Sometimes leading magazines even gave worse score for Amiga versions, because they didn't use the extra hardware. Not to mention Amiga games by Ocean were usually 5 pounds more expensive making them even less worth the asking price until things changed in the 89/90 when it became the lead platform and got cheap enough that people actually had money to buy one with a Ram expansion.

 

Someone had to lead the way in the early 16bit days to make "next gen" games like Dungeon Master, Carrier Command or Universal Military Simulator. It happened to be Atari's hardware which still is a tough bite for some people to swallow.

Sure it didn't perform well in arcade conversions due to lack of gaming hardware, but there were lot of great games for the older audience.

 

Even Retro Gamer mentioned Atari three times in their article of 50 things that changed gaming, while Amiga, as great as it's hardware is, didn't get a mention at all. It's not always about superiority of the hardware, but the time and place when things actually happened. If it were, most games would have been written for Acorn Archimedes.

YouTube videos are just games in attract mode. Like a car that can't be driven from the passenger seat. You can only admire scenery, but have no idea how it handles.

[guppy]

18 hours ago, zzip said:

Back then it changed hands twice, had mass layoffs, and split into two entities:  Atari Games and Atari Corp.    So 1996 Atari Corp already had very little in common with 1972 Atari.   But the internet acts like it was a single harmonious entity that got defiled by Hasbro or something.

"The internet" is a mindless mass that entertains many conflicting notions all at once, many of which are false. So enough said about that...

 

As I'd said earlier, the history is a bit messy, I don't know it all that well, others know it better than me, so I'm trying to avoid making precise statements as to when different Atari assets went to different branches when the company was split up, etc.  But be that as it may, at SOME POINT there was a break in continuity which took place when the various branches of Atari ceased operations and laid off all personnel.  After this point, clearly the "old" or "original" Atari ceased to be, and the current legal owners of Atari's IP have no direct lineage to that Atari.  They are, however, the rightful legal owners of the Atari name and other assets that they currently possess.  

 

It's a bit like if a wealthy person died, and they went to their estate sale and bid on some antiques, and because they now own them, they would like to pretend they're a blood relative to the deceased, and heir.  If this metaphor holds true, they're not.  They have the legal right to the property they legally bought, but that doesn't make them family.  Even if they change your name to the family name, and you want to revive and carry on the family name for the value of its prestige, they're still not of the original bloodline.

 

Except this isn't about family bloodlines, it's about business and intellectual property rights and assets.  So from a legal standpoint, yes, Atari SA is Atari.  And it seems like their current CEO is trying to do new development.  Good or bad (and I think it's by and large good) it's better than what the previous owners of Atari IP did, which was repackage and resell old Atari IP without doing any new development, and sell Atari-branded merchandise. But still a lot of people remember what happened with Atari from 1996-2016 -- a significant chunk of Atari's history, after all -- when the only new development of games for legacy Atari consoles was going on in the homebrew scene.  

 

Of course if we want to extend the "deceased wealthy person's estate sale" metaphor, the homebrew scene didn't even buy things from an estate sale; they walked into an apparently abandoned home and lovingly ransacked, took the cool things they found, and built new things with them, or built new things that were inspired by them.  But despite the lack of regard for doing things in a legally clean way, the "spirit of Atari" that meant developing new games and making the best games lived on through the Homebrew scene more than it ever did through the middle period roughly 1996-2016, where Atari was all-but dead and only cranking out re-releases. 

 

However, Atari Homebrew isn't/wasn't the true Atari, either; it's more accurate to describe it as "various independent third-party development" than it is a lineal descendant of "original Atari" (the Company).  Sometimes homebrewers trespassed on Trademarks, yes.  And sometimes those Trademarks were Atari's and sometimes they were the property of still other entities. But the homebrew scene did so with good intent: not commercial piracy or to deprive the trademark holders of anything, but to pay homage or to do "justice" to a game that deserved a better version than the market got from the official version. (But that intent not to harm starts to become muddled once AtariAge got into producing and selling physical cartridge products.)

 

And so now, with the acquisition of AtariAge, AtariAge is also Atari.

 

So as of the completion of the acquisition, Atari kindof owns the homebrew scene as well.  But it would be more accurate to say that Atari owns the relationship that Albert/AtariAge has cultivated with Homebrew Developers who still individually own the parts of their projects that they are entitled to own (eg, their works, but not any IPs owned by others that were used without authorization.)

[zzip]

17 hours ago, JPF997 said:

I mean Atari Games doesn't really count, they where never the true sucessor to Atari Inc, they couldn't even use the Atari name legally ( which is why they called themselves Tengen ) Atari Corporation was always the true sucessor to Atari Inc , and after they collapsed  the true sucessor to Atari Corporation became Atari SA a few years later ( former Infogrames) at least that's how I view things regarding this topic.

 

Atari Games was the arcade portion of Atari that Tramiel didn't want.    They were allowed to use the Atari name and fuji logo legally in the arcade domain,  they just weren't allowed to publish home games under that name.   (Likewise, Atari Corp wouldn't be allowed to create arcade games with the Atari name/logo had they wanted to)

 

So I think they are just as much a successor to Atari Inc as Atari Corp was.

 

I just think it's a matter of arcade cabinet manufacturers don't stir the passion in people the way home consoles/computers do.   That's why everyone focuses on Atari Corp and often forget the Atari Games half existed.

 

 

[TrogdarRobusto]

9 hours ago, KainXavier said:

@TrogdarRobusto

I don't think this has been asked before, but are there any plans to release a "standard" edition of the games in the Atari XP line?  Also, can we expect a $30 price point or will the price vary?

There are going to be both retail and collectible 2600 carts. the retail carts will be $29.99. The collectible XP carts will be $59.99.
At least that is what I see between now and the end of the year for new releases. 

[zzip]

6 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

How do you propose to overcome the issues behind licensing them?  The majority of software for the ST was third-party, like pretty much every other system in existence.

 

Personally, I'm not really itching to play the ST versions of Star Raiders, Moon Patrol, Super Breakout, etc.  Thing is, those are the ones most likely to see a first-party release since they were first-party titles to begin with.  Everything else has a (possibly significant) cost attached to it just to get it to market.

I guess start with the top ST games on Atarimania and see what licenses can realistically be acquired.   I think Atari already got a few of the top games through the Accolade/Microprose acquisition.   Who owns the FTL games?   Who owns Time Bandit?  Who owns the Epyx and Datasoft catalogs?   There may be things like that which are attainable.

 

4 hours ago, carlsson said:

Hm. Atarimania has 11,000 entries for A8. Some are hacks, homebrew, type-ins etc but surely not 9000+ of those belonging to those categories?

I'm pretty sure about 5,000 of them are Boulderdash levels      Also Atarimania has duplicate entries for many games, since there are separate entries when it was releases by different publishers and in different countries, etc.

 

5 hours ago, JPF997 said:

Yes Atari owns  Ocean software and micropose, a lot of potential for rereleases right there, also speaking of making new games for old hardware what about making more homebrew for the falcon, from what fans say it's supposedly one of the best piece's of hardware Atari ever made, severely underutilized.

There aren't many people with Falcons, and the state of Falcon emulation is still buggy from what I can tell.

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

4 minutes ago, zzip said:

I'm pretty sure about 5,000 of them are Boulderdash levels

You can never have enough of them.  

[Albert]

Just now, Thomas Jentzsch said:

You can never have enough of them.  

Agreed!!

 

 ..Al

[carlsson]

Does it mean you can work out the rights for a dedicated 1000-in-1 Boulder Dash® unit? 😁

[Albert]

Just now, carlsson said:

Does it mean you can work out the rights for a dedicated 1000-in-1 Boulder Dash® unit? 😁

How large is each level in terms of how much space they take up in the game binary? 

 

 ..Al

[Zoyous]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I just think it's a matter of arcade cabinet manufacturers don't stir the passion in people the way home consoles/computers do.   That's why everyone focuses on Atari Corp and often forget the Atari Games half existed.

Atari Games was knocking out one classic after another for years! I think it would be amazing if Atari could bring those games back into the fold, but they're all mixed in with the Williams and Midway libraries now. There might be some glimmer of hope due to the fact that the current owners don't care or maybe even know about the Atari Games titles as they're too busy flogging the latest Mortal Kombat reboot. I really don't like seeing the Midway logo on Atari Games and Williams releases.

[LatchKeyKid]

35 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Does it mean you can work out the rights for a dedicated 1000-in-1 Boulder Dash® unit? 😁

Why not?  I remember seeing CD's in the 1990s with hundreds or even a thousand DOOM and DOOM 2 levels on sale in stores.      Of course, I don't actually know *if* they sold but rather that they were simply on sale.

[guppy]

16 hours ago, azure said:

This might be a minority opinion, but I believe the 2600+ and VCS are real Ataris as well as the Flashbacks. They're just not what I wanted.

They are and they aren't.  They're "real Atari" in the sense that they are real products offered by a company that really is Atari.

 

They're not, if you consider the IP they re-package/re-release to be inferior or inauthentic -- whether due to imperfect emulation, lack of 100% compatibility, or inferior build quality/durability, or failing to provide the correct controller hardware, or what have you.  If you want the "real" experience of playing a real game on real hardware on a real TV, emulating the game imperfectly on a modern TV just isn't going to be the same. 

 

I don't want to divert too deeply into details, but I had a friend bring me an AtGames Flashback 7, and yeah it's a real Atari.  Unfortunately it's a piece of junk, and it has some fault whereby it resets every few seconds, making it completely unplayable.  We got to enjoy it for maybe an hour before this happened.  The games it played, it played decently.  I wasn't looking for tiny imperfections in the emulation, and the two games I got to play (Adventure, Battlezone) felt like I remembered them playing on my original Atari 2600 4-switch woody back in 1980-82, and they looked just fine on a HDTV screen. 

 

16 hours ago, azure said:

This might be a minority opinion, but I believe the 2600+ and VCRegardless, Pat the NES Punk had valid points. I would have lined up to order the 2600+ if it had built-in support for 2600 bankswitching and thus full support for modern homebrews. The "NO CARTRIDGE LEFT BEHIND" ad copy was and is blatant misinformation.

Amen.

 

16 hours ago, azure said:

The 2600+ is the result of a game maker failing to perform due diligence in finding out what their fan-base actually wants.

Either it's that, or it's the reality of "we can't do all that, but we can do something" and this is what we get.

  

16 hours ago, azure said:

However, none of us are going to get everything we want (i.e. re-releasing original hardware, reversing time, re-animating dead relatives, and returning to the golden days of home video gaming,) because doing so is a profit losing proposition. An Android board inside an Atari shell is the best we're ever going to get from a for-profit business that has real expenses and real salaries to pay.

To some extent, that's correct. Atari SA is a $68 million dollar company, which is pretty small.  They can't do a lot of things that Atari could back in the Warner days because Warner was a massive company with a lot of resources and capabilities.  We have to understand what Atari SA can do, and keep expectations realistic relative to that.

 

I own a RetroUSB AVS and a CollectorVision Phoenix, both of which I like a lot.  They implement an FPGA core that faithfully reproduces the native hardware of the original consoles that they were based on (NES/Famicom, Colecovision).  They each cost $180 (several years ago, so let's guess that they'd be something over $200 today).  

I think an FPGA-based Atari legacy console is within the reach of Atari, and if fan-enthusiast companies like Collectorvision and RetroUSB are capable of engineering, manufacturing, and shipping them for ~$200, if Atari can't do just as well, then I don't understand what the value is of being a $68M company if they can't match price and feature set that a tiny operation like RetroUSB and CollectorVision could.

I also look at what Analogue does with their FPGA-based systems, which yes are pricey, but yes definitely also exist, and sell out whenever they announce them. 

 

This level of quality and features is where I'd like to see Atari SA get to... soon.  It seems that for the last 20-ish years that Atari has targeted the bargain basement casual nostalgia market, not the enthusiast fan market.  The market for a $50 embedded console system is perhaps larger and easier to reach, but the market for a $200-500 premium system for enthusiasts that emphasizes quality and authenticity exists, and is mostly neglected.

 

I see no reason why Atari SA can't serve this market, but I don't see it from the business side, so there may be difficulties I can't understand, or there might be plans to get there that just haven't materialized yet.  

 

We don't really know whether the 2600+ is simply a release-and-forget product that will be made in one batch and sell what it sells, or if it is a new product line that Atari SA will build on and expand, and (perhaps) improve to a premium level that would interest a customer like me.  I'm hoping for the latter, but I don't know what to expect, so it's a wait-and-see.

[Flojomojo]

4 minutes ago, guppy said:

I don't see it from the business side, so there may be difficulties I can't understand, or there might be plans to get there that just haven't materialized yet.  

 

We don't really know whether the 2600+ is simply a release-and-forget product that will be made in one batch and sell what it sells, or if it is a new product line that Atari SA will build on and expand, and (perhaps) improve to a premium level that would interest a customer like me.  I'm hoping for the latter, but I don't know what to expect, so it's a wait-and-see.

This is how I see it as well. I'm interested in seeing what they'll do next but I'm not the hardcore enthusiast that wants it to be perfect. 

 

I fully agree that there are business angles that we can't fully see or appreciate. How big is the market of cartridge collectors, really? (I have no idea -- it could be more than I thought, what with the WATA grading and pricing bubbles in other game platforms)

 

There could also be legal or strategic angles as well. Having a cartridge-playing Atari system on the market could change the atmosphere, like by freezing out Hyperkin, or at worst, continuing the copyright/patent troll behavior that made money for Atari under Fred Chesnais. I sure hope I'm wrong about that. But having  2600+ out there gives Atari options. Options are good. 

[zzip]

1 hour ago, guppy said:

As I'd said earlier, the history is a bit messy, I don't know it all that well, others know it better than me, so I'm trying to avoid making precise statements as to when different Atari assets went to different branches when the company was split up, etc.  But be that as it may, at SOME POINT there was a break in continuity which took place when the various branches of Atari ceased operations and laid off all personnel.  After this point, clearly the "old" or "original" Atari ceased to be, and the current legal owners of Atari's IP have no direct lineage to that Atari.  They are, however, the rightful legal owners of the Atari name and other assets that they currently possess.  

Many use the "different people involved" argument to justify why Atari now isn't real Atari, but the Atari of 1996 was.    I don't think it holds water for a few reasons.

1) Warner laid off a ton of people as times got tough,  When Jack bought it, he laid off the majority of the staff

2) Corporations are usually about the brand and not about the people involved (with some exceptions).   Atari was known for not wanting to give their programmers credit, which is why a bunch left to form Activision.   Of the famous Atarians whose names we do know:  i.e Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Jobs, Todd Frye, Howard Scott Warshaw,  Mark Cerney-  all were gone long before 1996

3) Even if ownership was unbroken,  most of the early staff would be retired by now and it would be all new people anyway.

 

I'd also argue that Atari Corp was a very different company from Atari Inc.   For one, Jack changed the focus to  be a computer company.   Computers were a less-important product line under Warner, but they were now front-and-center under Tramiel, with a computer designed by ex-Commodore engineers being priority one.   They also tried to clean it up with a more business friendly focus so that they could sell computers to the business world.  They tried to get into the workstation market.  They were producing a PC line.    Consoles were an afterthought at first.   They just wanted to sell the existing stock of consoles to help keep the lights on.   After a few years they realized there was money to be made in console gaming and computer opportunities were drying up so you saw a pivot.

 

But one other big difference was Atari Inc was the undisputed king of the home videogame market and even Nintendo was afraid of them.   Atari Corp allowed Nintendo to take over the market without a fight.   That shows how different the focus was.

 

1 hour ago, guppy said:

So as of the completion of the acquisition, Atari kindof owns the homebrew scene as well.  But it would be more accurate to say that Atari owns the relationship that Albert/AtariAge has cultivated with Homebrew Developers who still individually own the parts of their projects that they are entitled to own (eg, their works, but not any IPs owned by others that were used without authorization.)

Back in the 80s, Atari had the Atari Program Exchange or APX which published software developed by the community.  Some went on to become full Atari products.   Seems like AtariAge publishing will act like a spirtual successor to that.   Yes the unauthorized IPs are gone, but those always seemed like a ticking time bomb to me anyway.   There's other ways for homebrewers to get published as well. 

[Flojomojo]

4 minutes ago, zzip said:

Many use the "different people involved" argument to justify why Atari now isn't real Atari, but the Atari of 1996 was.    I don't think it holds water for a few reasons.

1) Warner laid off a ton of people as times got tough,  When Jack bought it, he laid off the majority of the staff

2) Corporations are usually about the brand and not about the people involved (with some exceptions).   Atari was known for not wanting to give their programmers credit, which is why a bunch left to form Activision.   Of the famous Atarians whose names we do know:  i.e Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Jobs, Todd Frye, Howard Scott Warshaw,  Mark Cerney-  all were gone long before 1996

3) Even if ownership was unbroken,  most of the early staff would be retired by now and it would be all new people anyway.

Yup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

[Thomas Jentzsch]

52 minutes ago, Albert said:

How large is each level in terms of how much space they take up in the game binary? 

Really small.

 

There is a level definition format, which allows random elements, lines, single elements etc. The size varies, but it is less than 100 bytes/cave on average.

[CapitanClassic]

11 hours ago, thanatos said:

 

Well, that was really the joke. 

Sadly I missed your reply four days ago, I've been at VCFMW, but now there are 30+ more pages??  Holy crap I'm never going to catch up!

 

You are just adding to the problem. Damn, now I’m doing it.

[Swift Justice]

Eh, I just want to play Autoduel again...

[guppy]

4 minutes ago, zzip said:

Many use the "different people involved" argument to justify why Atari now isn't real Atari, but the Atari of 1996 was.    I don't think it holds water for a few reasons.

1) Warner laid off a ton of people as times got tough,  When Jack bought it, he laid off the majority of the staff

2) Corporations are usually about the brand and not about the people involved (with some exceptions).   Atari was known for not wanting to give their programmers credit, which is why a bunch left to form Activision.   Of the famous Atarians whose names we do know:  i.e Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Jobs, Todd Frye, Howard Scott Warshaw,  Mark Cerney-  all were gone long before 1996

3) Even if ownership was unbroken,  most of the early staff would be retired by now and it would be all new people anyway.

My own opinion on this is just my own opinion.

 

To me, the Atari that I loved and cared about was primarily the Atari of the Warner era.  I was 5-6 years old in 1980, when the VCS was already 3 years old, and I played Atari 2600 games from 1981 on.  At some point we got a 7800, so that's of the Tramiel era.  And we put both away when Nintendo came out with the NES, when we got one for Christmas 1987.  I was aware of but didn't own or care much about the 8-bit computer line, but of course there's no denying that any of that stuff was "real Atari".  My cousin had a 5200, and I got to play it a few times.  I played many Atari coin-op games in arcades, probably from the era of Asteroids to Star Wars: The Arcade Game. You could also easily include the stuff from the early days:  Computer Space, Pong, and all the rest up through about '84-'86, for me.

 

Obviously the Lynx and the Jaguar deserve to be considered "real Atari" as well.  To me, it's really less about what was "real" and "not real" and more about "When did Atari start sucking?"  Atari always had hits and misses, but I guess the point at which Atari lost the market lead and ceased to be dominant.  But even then, they were "real" and doing some things that didn't suck.  It just wasn't enough to save the company.

 

All the other Atari stuff that I'm not passionate about, I recognize of course others are, and they're legitimate Atari fans just like I am, and have claim to be part of the community.

 

As to your points:

1) The layoffs aren't the thing that defines the "breakpoint" for me.  It's the cessation of operations, particularly new development of technology and games.  But yes, large scale layoffs can also affect the company culture, identity, and most importantly, the nature and quality of its products.  So they're not irrelevant, either.  Basically, any big, era-defining changes, can be marker points.

2) The company branding is the most visible thing, but the people do matter, whether we know about them or not.  Atari was Atari because of who Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabny, Al Alcorn, and the other early big players at the company were.  Atari became something else during the Ray Kassar years.  But Ray inadvertently proved that the people do matter, when he drove the best of them to found Activision, and Activision turned out to be a worthy company.  I didn't care about Activision because it was a brand; I cared about it because they made great games.  And they made great games because they had talented people.  The people do matter; their capabilities and work matters.

3) Sure, as generations go through their life cycle, the ship-of-theseus that is a company will change over time.  But retirements don't happen all at once; there is continuity of operation.  Corporate culture evolves but a historical thread of it is preserved over time.  When a company ceases operations, is liquidated, and some new owner decides many years later to revive the brand and begin new operations, it's a new beginning, a new chapter, a new company. 

 

If an artist named Picasso had owned a painting shop where he sold his paintings, and then went broke, and sold the shop and all the paintings to a new owner, and that new owner sold prints of Atair original paintings, and also tried to create new paintings, attempting to capture the style of Picasso in those new works, no one would call the "new Picassos" painted by the successor Picassos.  Whether they are good paintings or not is what should matter, not whether they're "true Picassos" or not.  But for some purposes it can be important to differentiate which we're talking about:  Picasso the man, Picasso the painting, Picasso the workshop, Picasso the store, and yes, Picasso's the store after Picasso went out of business, sold the store and its merchandise into receivership, it went to auction, and then a new guy came around and bought it all and decided to try to re-open and sell more art, some of which was old copies of Picasso work, and some of which was new works that tried to carry on something of the old Picasso tradition. 

 

4 minutes ago, zzip said:

Back in the 80s, Atari had the Atari Program Exchange or APX which published software developed by the community.  Some went on to become full Atari products.   Seems like AtariAge publishing will act like a spirtual successor to that.   Yes the unauthorized IPs are gone, but those always seemed like a ticking time bomb to me anyway.   There's other ways for homebrewers to get published as well. 

I wasn't aware of APX, and that's really cool that it existed. 

 

I think you're right that AtariAge is positioned to be a spiritual successor to that.  And you're also right that the IP liabilities thing is really not a problem that is caused by the Atari acquisition -- it's always been there.  It's just that the acquisition has triggered the takedown that we all knew could happen at any time someday.  And I can't fault Atari for that; they're bound to follow the law. 

 

I think Albert's decision to join forces with Atari is ultimately best for the site and the community, even if it means that parts of the community will necessarily have to be shed due to IP infringement concerns, or due to people being upset about some aspect of it or other and deciding to go. 

 

It still sucks that those things will have to go, but that's a cause to call for copyleft reforms of IP law, not reasons to be angry with Atari.