AtariAge + Atari Q&A

[+GoldLeader]

One Tiny iteration of this company ago was an "atari" (Chesnais era) that I'd call downright hostile to those on this forum...HMmmm...Guess everybody quickly forgot.

Edited September 27, 2023 by GoldLeader
I even say this as an Eternal Optimist...Nothing wrong with caution and remembering history...

[JPF997]

16 minutes ago, guppy said:

There's a lot that Atari don't own, and never will, or at least not in any foreseeable future that is likely to happen.  In the 80s, they were able to use their power as the market leader to obtain licenses to port many non-Atari arcade games:  Space Invaders, Defender, Pac-Man, the list goes on.  The ins and outs of all those deals must be a labyrinth.  

Today, Bandai-Namco owns the rights to Pac-Man, as well as many other classic titles and trademarks.  Bally-Williams owns a lot of classic arcade era IPs: Defender, Robotron 2084, etc.  Activision is another one.  Etc.

 

It's unlikely Atari would ever acquire any of these, but they're attractive for homebrew/hobbyists to dabble with.  Never-were projects like Champ Games' "homages" to Zookeeper and Galaga and Robotron.  And "shoulda been" projects like Pac-Man 8k that improve over the official release of some game.  There are a lot of games that either did once get a release on Atari legacy platforms, or never did but would have been attractive if they had, that Atari once had (in all likelihood limited) publishing rights to and very likely no longer continue to hold rights to.  The AtariAge homebrew community could/does/did work on projects to do ports for "missing" games from the Atari 2600 library, or do better ports, or do mods, or sequels.  

Atari can only give permission to use what they themselves have the ownership rights to, which isn't nothing, but it's not everything.

Some of the stuff you mentioned never belonged to them, people just associated those games with Atari because it was the biggest gaming company around, Pac Man, the Activision games and Space Invaders are perfect examples of this. What Atari actually owned and created has mostly been reacquired, besides Battlezone and the game's Warner owns I don't see much else that was made by Atari that they don't currently own.

[JPF997]

7 minutes ago, GoldLeader said:

One Tiny iteration of this company ago was an "atari" (Chesnais era) that I'd call downright hostile to those on this forum...HMmmm...Guess everybody quickly forgot.

I remember those day's, when no one took Atari seriously any more, when they became the laughing stock of the gaming industry, it was painful to see that growing up with the current version of Atari in the early 2000s, that 2013 bankruptcy nearly destroyed them and what Fred did later almost killed the Brand's remaining reputation, dark days those where to be an Atari fan (the speaker hat and the VCS are literally the only two  good things that came out of that era, one was a licensed product and the other only became good when the new leadership actually started making games for it, so even those things I wouldn't give Fred too much credit for ).

[guppy]

6 minutes ago, JPF997 said:

Some of the stuff you mentioned never belonged to them, people just associated those games with Atari because it was the biggest gaming company around, Pac Man, the Activision games and Space Invaders are perfect examples of this. What Atari actually owned and created has mostly been reacquired, besides Battlezone and the game's Warner owns I don't see much else that was made by Atari that they don't currently own.

Right. Point being, a hobbyist programmer doesn't care who properly owns whatever IP that inspires them. They just want to make their idea. And Atari could grant open license to do that with the iPs they actually own, but that still leaves a lot of classic titles off limits to hobbyists. And there's not a lot that can be done about that. So ok; we do what we can with what we have. 

[zzip]

33 minutes ago, guppy said:

There's a lot that Atari don't own, and never will, or at least not in any foreseeable future that is likely to happen.  In the 80s, they were able to use their power as the market leader to obtain licenses to port many non-Atari arcade games:  Space Invaders, Defender, Pac-Man, the list goes on.  The ins and outs of all those deals must be a labyrinth.  

Today, Bandai-Namco owns the rights to Pac-Man, as well as many other classic titles and trademarks.  Bally-Williams owns a lot of classic arcade era IPs: Defender, Robotron 2084, etc.  Activision is another one.  Etc.

Pac-man was alway owned by Namco with Bally/Midway producing arcade cabinets.    It's a game that gets erroneously associated with Atari, but Atari only ever had the home publishing rights.   People also falsly associate Space Invaders and Defender with Atari.

 

There's some trickier ones like Pole Position and Dig Dug that we all thought were Atari games BITD because the Atari logo was splashed all over the arcade cabinet,  and Pole Position even had in-game Fuji Logo billboards, but they were Namco IPs too.

 

At any rate, I don't think anyone expects Atari to acquire the above games,  (but they could always surprise us like they did with Berzerk/Frenzy).    A lot of us would like to see the Atari Games catalog reunited with the pre-1984 Arcade catalog Atari currently owns, and Battlezone brought back into the fold.

[guppy]

2 minutes ago, zzip said:

Pac-man was alway owned by Namco with Bally/Midway producing arcade cabinets.    It's a game that gets erroneously associated with Atari, but Atari only ever had the home publishing rights.   People also falsly associate Space Invaders and Defender with Atari.

 

There's some trickier ones like Pole Position and Dig Dug that we all thought were Atari games BITD because the Atari logo was splashed all over the arcade cabinet,  and Pole Position even had in-game Fuji Logo billboards, but they were Namco IPs too.

 

At any rate, I don't think anyone expects Atari to acquire the above games,  (but they could always surprise us like they did with Berzerk/Frenzy).    A lot of us would like to see the Atari Games catalog reunited with the pre-1984 Arcade catalog Atari currently owns, and Battlezone brought back into the fold.

This is because of the complexity of the relationships between companies that brought these games to market. 

 

One company might develop a title, another gets involved in the manufacture of the arcade cabinet, another deals with distribution, another licenses the title to be developed and published on a home console. The port is developed by yet another party under contract, etc. 

 

So the rights are often not cleanly held by a single entity, which makes it really difficult to find who to get permission from. That's part of the problem that Atari SA will have with permissive open licensing for titles that were published and developed by Atari in house, but under license from Namco or some other company. 

[desiv]

34 minutes ago, guppy said:

but that still leaves a lot of classic titles off limits to hobbyists

To be fair, that's never stopped hobbyists before...
And yeah, they might not be able to sell non-licensed remakes on AA, but that doesn't mean they can't be made and sold...    They probably wouldn't be as professional, but I would think they will still exist.  3D printers, eproms, PCBWay...  It's not difficult for even a small hobbyist to do that nowadays... 

[guppy]

17 minutes ago, desiv said:

To be fair, that's never stopped hobbyists before...

*Before*; yes, precisely. Things changed with the Last Chance sale. So if hobbyist/fangame development continues, it may not be here, and it will not be given the physical cart publication treatment here. 

 

But, as much as possible, I'd like to see Atari SA grant license to develop for Atari legacy hardware using Atari-owned IP freely, and commercial releases (eg physical carts) under friendly terms that don't restrict what hobbyist developers can do with Atari IP on legacy platforms, as long as they stay "in their lane" (so ports and releases on modern platforms are subject to different licensing terms, in other words). 

[desiv]

2 minutes ago, guppy said:

*Before*; yes, precisely. Things changed with the Last Chance sale.

Well, things changed here on AA, for those reasons...

But AA isn't necessarily the only way to get carts...

If there is a desire and AA can't provide them, then I think they might still be available somewhere... 

It might not be as nice as what AA puts together, but then again it could be... 

Other systems (non-Atari) get carts with boxes and manuals...
Yeah, it might be disappointing that we can't get unlicensed games on AA, but I understand that, and I don't see it as an issue.

The community finds a way. 

[guppy]

5 minutes ago, desiv said:

Well, things changed here on AA, for those reasons...

But AA isn't necessarily the only way to get carts...

If there is a desire and AA can't provide them, then I think they might still be available somewhere... 

It might not be as nice as what AA puts together, but then again it could be... 

Other systems (non-Atari) get carts with boxes and manuals...
Yeah, it might be disappointing that we can't get unlicensed games on AA, but I understand that, and I don't see it as an issue.

The community finds a way. 

Yes; infringement will not cease. But finding cool projects to check out is a lot easier when the community isn't fragmented and driven underground. 

 

It's not my position that it's Atari/AtariAge's fault that is likely to happen; it's the legal landscape that drives it. It's my position that we should advocate for reform of the applicable laws to reinforce and strengthen Fair Use, Public Domain, and copyleft licenses such as Creative Commons, GPL, MIT, etc. And we should petition Atari to embrace open use of Atari IP on games developed for legacy platforms, to encourage the community to remain here and remain vibrant and vital. 

[desiv]

4 minutes ago, guppy said:

It's my position that we should advocate for reform of the applicable laws to reinforce and strengthen Fair Use, Public Domain, and copyleft licenses such as Creative Commons, GPL, MIT, etc. And we should petition Atari to embrace open use of Atari IP on games developed for legacy platforms, to encourage the community to remain here and remain vibrant and vital. 

Don't disagree there at all!  Not sure how optimistic I am about it, but yeah....

 

As for finding infringing products, personally I've never had any problem finding any when I wanted to...

...

er..

 

if...

if I wanted to..

 

I mean, of course, I never actually would.. I was talking hypothetically....

 

Yeah...

 

[zzip]

22 minutes ago, guppy said:

*Before*; yes, precisely. Things changed with the Last Chance sale. So if hobbyist/fangame development continues, it may not be here, and it will not be given the physical cart publication treatment here. 

Hobbyists have done this since the beginning, don't see why they'd stop now.   I have tons of high-quality arcade rip-offs on ST and DOS,  some were made available for free, others used the shareware model.   People will find a way.   

 

1 hour ago, guppy said:

One company might develop a title, another gets involved in the manufacture of the arcade cabinet, another deals with distribution, another licenses the title to be developed and published on a home console. The port is developed by yet another party under contract, etc. 

And sometimes the game is based on another property.  Atari developed a bunch of Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, not to mention ET,  but the license to rerelease such games is probably out of reach now

[zzip]

34 minutes ago, guppy said:

But, as much as possible, I'd like to see Atari SA grant license to develop for Atari legacy hardware using Atari-owned IP freely, and commercial releases (eg physical carts) under friendly terms that don't restrict what hobbyist developers can do with Atari IP on legacy platforms, as long as they stay "in their lane" (so ports and releases on modern platforms are subject to different licensing terms, in other words). 

It doesn't seem like the homebrew community infringes on Atari IPs that often, except maybe Asteroids.    So if Atari opened their licenses, it doesn't guarantee games will get made based off them.

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Pac-man was alway owned by Namco with Bally/Midway producing arcade cabinets.    It's a game that gets erroneously associated with Atari, but Atari only ever had the home publishing rights.

Pac-Man and its relatives are a great example of how convoluted IP ownership can become.  Just on the arcade side:

• Pac-Man: Namco, licensed to Bally / Midway
• Super Pac-Man: Namco, licensed to Bally / Midway
• Pac & Pal: Namco, no distribution outside of Japan
• Pac-Man and Chomp-Chomp: Namco, almost licensed to Bally / Midway, but they decided against it in the end
• Pac-Land: Namco, licensed to Bally / Midway

 

• Ms. Pac-Man: created by GCC, licensed to Bally / Midway
• Pac-Man Plus: created by Bally / Midway
• Baby Pac-Man: created by Bally / Midway
• Professor Pac-Man: created by Bally-Midway
• Jr. Pac-Man: created by GCC, licensed to Bally / Midway

 

• Pac-Mania: created by Namco, licensed to Atari

 

With all of the parties involved, lawsuits, bankruptcies, mergers & acquisitions, subsequent changes of ownership over the years, etc., it's a small miracle that any of the rights to it other than the original game were at all able to be determined.  The fiasco surrounding Ms. Pac-Man's ownership a few years ago was a really good example of this.

[guppy]

3 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Pac-Man and its relatives are a great example of how convoluted IP ownership can become.  Just on the arcade side:

Absolutely! 

3 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

With all of the parties involved, lawsuits, bankruptcies, mergers & acquisitions, subsequent changes of ownership over the years, etc., it's a small miracle that any of the rights to it other than the original game were at all able to be determined.  The fiasco surrounding Ms. Pac-Man's ownership a few years ago was a really good example of this.

And Namco has basically erased Ms. Pac Man from the canon rather than continue to share revenue with GCC. 

[digdugnate]

26 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Pac-Man and its relatives are a great example of how convoluted IP ownership can become.  Just on the arcade side:

• Pac-Man: Namco, licensed to Bally / Midway
• Super Pac-Man: Namco, licensed to Bally / Midway
• Pac & Pal: Namco, no distribution outside of Japan
• Pac-Man and Chomp-Chomp: Namco, almost licensed to Bally / Midway, but they decided against it in the end
• Pac-Land: Namco, licensed to Bally / Midway

 

• Ms. Pac-Man: created by GCC, licensed to Bally / Midway
• Pac-Man Plus: created by Bally / Midway
• Baby Pac-Man: created by Bally / Midway
• Professor Pac-Man: created by Bally-Midway
• Jr. Pac-Man: created by GCC, licensed to Bally / Midway

 

• Pac-Mania: created by Namco, licensed to Atari

 

With all of the parties involved, lawsuits, bankruptcies, mergers & acquisitions, subsequent changes of ownership over the years, etc., it's a small miracle that any of the rights to it other than the original game were at all able to be determined.  The fiasco surrounding Ms. Pac-Man's ownership a few years ago was a really good example of this.

 

The whole Ms. Pac-Man licensing fiasco really bums me out.  I'd sure like to have it to play on my Switch (for example) versus using a ROM or playing on the XBox.

[roots.genoa]

3 hours ago, JPF997 said:

even if Warner doesn't do anything with them these days

That's not exactly true. Warner licensed several games for an Arcade1Up cabinet for instance.

But I agree they should do a lot more than that.

 

And regarding the homebrew scene, even though I'm fully aware that it's easier for programmers to port a classic, since they're usually no artist or game designer, it would be a lot better if we had more original creations rather than copyright infringing ports.

Edited September 27, 2023 by roots.genoa

[Wildstar]

6 hours ago, jerseystyle said:

I think this is really overstating their potential. The 100+ million consumers thing doesn’t translate to anything (as we learned when Atari used it the first time, and Amico’s famous 1billion consumer market). And to use Bethesda, last year their revenue was 116 million (something like that) which, on the surface, seems a bit low until you realize they earned 100+ million without releasing anything. Last year with all their releases Atari lost like 10 million. So I don’t think those 1 million game sales are as easy to achieve. I think they need to set much smaller goals for themselves and lean into the retro side of things (which they have, so it’s progress). Have any of their releases hit 100k sales? If so that’s a positive for sure.

I'm saying the market not the number of customers. In fact, the number of potential customers in all those market is every PC desktop or laptop owner, every Android smartphone owner, etc. From that, you are talking those interested in the particular game or genre of games. The total potential customers worldwide is north of a billion users. The amount any particular game sells would be considerably less. I'm not saying it is easy. The game has to be good. Atari brand is a known brand with easily hundreds of millions of people on the world living today that knows and recognizes the Atari name even today. The number of games sold is a variable and sales of 100,000 copies of a game is achievable. If you have 10-25 new games making those level of sales selling in the $10-$20 range, $10M to $50M. If the games averaged closer to 150,000 to 250,000 units sold a year per game, the sales would be decent for Atari. If Atari published 1000 new homebrewed/small indie studio games making an average of 10,000 copies sales at $5-$10 and Atari keeps, say 10% making $0.50 to $1 per copy. That can bring $5M-$10M. If they were making 20%, that would raise that by 2x. If sales volume reached and average of 50,000 copies... that could be $50M to $100M. 

 

Video Game industry is always speculative by nature and no guarantees. That's the nature of reality.

 

Commercial games should be expected to be higher volume of sales especially if its done with high quality but they are not something you slap together over a weekend or two. They are serious commitment for significant effort and time needed to be spent to develop. These can easily sell over a 100,000 copies and a million or more worldwide is not unheard of.

 

Atari being a video game publisher is potentially doable. EA has been successful in the role and lessons from that can be valuable. Atari could possibly do a better job at being a publisher in the sense of how they treat developers in the process and be quite successful with the brand recognition that is uniquely recognized. 

 

 

 

Edited September 27, 2023 by Wildstar

[Flojomojo]

5 hours ago, Arno1978 said:

Speaking of hardware however, there are still some unique possibilities. I did share an idea with then of replacing aging and dying crt screens for arcade machines and making new monitors as replacements for old computer monitors and even making a 70s/80s style crt tv. As usual no word back and probably dismissing the idea. A while ago I found out about LPD - laser phosphor projection. Almost exactly like CRT, but using lasers and mirrors instead of an electon beam and vacuum tube. I believe it's the technology that could save crt by replacing it with screens with the exact same functionality. And it's safer to boot. The company that owns the technology - Prysm seems oblivious to the gaming community and the dire need to preserve crt gaming. If Atari partnered with them, it would give Atari a unique harware opportunity. They were unique in the 70s and 80s making hardware that could display a game on a tv or monitor. Now they could do something that was the other way around.

That's an interesting idea. I think monetizing it would be hard, because there are razor thin margins on screen hardware (hasn't been a western manufacturer for decades as far as I know) and the mainstream, commodity LCDs are "good enough" for people who value low prices. Have you ever seen one of those laser/mirror screens in person? I'd love to put my eyes on one. 

5 hours ago, zzip said:

And it would make us part owners in this forum and we get to tell Al how to run it!   

Some of us will try to continue to do that for free, for as long as we're allowed to. 😇

4 hours ago, guppy said:

I can tell in the future I'm likely to hear a lot of "Atari SA is beholden to act in the interest of its stock holders, not do what's best for the AtariAge community... " nonsense and so I think my 1000 shares will come in handy at that point. 

I knew that paying $50 fees on a $130 purchase would pay off! j/k

Spoiler

or maybe not

3 hours ago, JPF997 said:

Some of the stuff you mentioned never belonged to them, people just associated those games with Atari because it was the biggest gaming company around, Pac Man, the Activision games and Space Invaders are perfect examples of this. What Atari actually owned and created has mostly been reacquired, besides Battlezone and the game's Warner owns I don't see much else that was made by Atari that they don't currently own.

Atari added a lot of value to those old names back in the olden days, when they were on top, but that was a long time ago, like 3 generations ago. Note that Warner's "Atari" games are from after the 1984 split. Games by the company called Atari Games are not the same thing as Atari SA. Roadsters, Paperboy, Marble Madness, etc -- NOT AtariAge's Atari. Arguably that's where the better stuff is. 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Hobbyists have done this since the beginning, don't see why they'd stop now.   I have tons of high-quality arcade rip-offs on ST and DOS,  some were made available for free, others used the shareware model.   People will find a way.   

 

And sometimes the game is based on another property.  Atari developed a bunch of Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, not to mention ET,  but the license to rerelease such games is probably out of reach now

Some of the old Atari licenses like Star Wars and Indiana Jones are in unusual places, like on AtGames or Arcade1up arcade machines and on AntStream cloud streaming platforms. Those releases give me hope that they'll appear elsewhere, someday. Maybe those places have more favorable terms than traditional console stores? 

 

I guess this is the "what is the future of Atari?" thread now!

[JPF997]

2 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:

 

 

I guess this is the "what is the future of Atari?" thread now!

Always has been

 

 

[Matt_B]

16 hours ago, Wildstar said:

The cryptocurrency is a dead end. If they follow news in the U.S. Cryptocurrency, the trust in it, is down. Case note: Sam Bankman-Fried case. This can an issue. Some of Chesnais Era stuff probably needs to be dropped like the Hotel. I think two years ago, it might have been fine and seemed okay at the time the idea first been conceived but the climate relating to cryptocurrency is not so good. Recent bitcoin issues the past couple years should be a red flag concern about continuing on that plan. Elements of crypto tech is fine like blockchain but some of the reason people are using cryptocurrency is basically tax evasion and types of criminal activity.  It happens more in this domain so its kind of raising legal issues. 

 

Atari should focus its efforts on video games. Cut the Atari Token thing. This was something of Chenais Atari Hotel/Gambling casino idea. That's just deadweight sinking the ship. The video game side is growing. That's the positive. As games launch, those sales may increase if they are good games. Improve portfolio of good games for sale on various platforms and if they can triple their game revenue, without increasing there cost next year, they will come out with a positive. Ultimately, the goal should be increase the revenue from games by 6x to 12x by 2025 or 2026. Increasing 7m euros to 70m euros will be a good sign. Drop the Web3. The VCS... maybe. Maintain and improve the Atari store and make perhaps an enhanced AtariOS live distribution that can be used on any PC desktop or laptop with full access to drivers and everything in the LINUX world. The OS has value and the store can be. The initial work and being open enough so it's not VCS specific as well as the store. Once some key issues are resolved, the cost to maintain the distro reduces. Keeping up with the open-source updates. 

 

More important, you want games on the hardware people have like the PC, their smart phones, and mainstream consoles. That makes the games reach a market of 100+ million users. With a wide net, an individual game can garner 100,000 to 1,000,000 copies sold a year.  Back in 1990s to 2000, Infogrames made $200M+ a year for several of those years. This is decent money for a video game company. More than what Bethesda makes a year. It will be impossible to jump to that in a year but increasing revenues incrementally over 5-10 years is conceivable. 

 

The hotel deal is already dead, and along with it their association with the company that created the Atari token.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/atari-announces-planned-creation-token-160500017.html

This resulted in a €11 million write down. So much for the idea that any of this crap was free money for Atari.

Like it or not, the Atari token will live on for the lifetime of the Etherium blockchain. Once you create something like that it's got a life of its own, beyond the reach of even trademark law, so that's yet more tarnish on the brand that's not going to come off.

 

The VCS project also resulted in substantial writedowns. While I'd think that it's worthwhile to keep supporting it at the level it currently is for the sake of goodwill with the fans, it'll never be a profitable venture and any substantial investment in it now would just be throwing good money after bad. While I'm not particularly enamored with the 2600+, at least that looks like it'll be a launch-and-leave affair that doesn't leave them on the hook for much in the way of long-term support.

 

On the whole, I'd think that Atari can respect their legacy far better by publishing indie games that respect their past, compilations of classics and remasters of selected titles. They're doing quite well at that so far, so I hope they stick at it.

 

Getting back into AAA games or genuinely competitive console hardware is just pie in the sky stuff. Give them a chance to learn how to walk before expecting them to fly.

 

[+jgkspsx]

7 hours ago, desiv said:

Just please don't submit it to the Reddit WallStreetBets group so they can meme stock it...

We don't want to "Gamestop" the new Atari....

 

...

or. do we..

(Kidding, NO!!)

We could be in the pictures!

 

 

[+jgkspsx]

58 minutes ago, Matt_B said:

The hotel deal is already dead, and along with it their association with the company that created the Atari token.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/atari-announces-planned-creation-token-160500017.html

This resulted in a €11 million write down.

This could have been a write down of penalties due to ending the contract early, or it could have been due to the loss of future revenue. That doesn’t mean they were losing money on it while it was active.

[+jgkspsx]

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

Maybe.  For my part, at least, I'm under no illusions that all this crap will continue to be worth about what I paid for it, possibly even less 

If you calculate what all these old Atari games and systems would have sold for in 1981 in today’s money, and then look at how much money you would have today if you invested the average AtariAger’s collection’s value in some mutual fund instead, it’s kind of mindblowing.

 

As a fun exercise, I just calculated approximately what my 2600 collection would have cost if I bought it new instead of at garage sales. It’s a little over $10000.

 

Just adjusting for inflation it would be about $36000 in today’s dollars.

But according to this article:

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/heres-what-10000-investment-sp-500-index-fund-1980-would-be-worth-today-2018-02-08

if the people who originally bought it had invested instead in an S&P500 index fund, it would have been worth $760000 in 2018.

 

According to this analysis the value of an S&P 500 index fund has grown by 66% since February 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/697624/monthly-sandp-500-index-performance/

 

So overall $1.2 million dollars. Which is a lot more impressive than the ~$1500 (to be generous) my collection is worth.

[desiv]

10 minutes ago, jgkspsx said:

So overall $1.2 million dollars. Which is a lot more impressive than the ~$1500 (to be generous) my collection is worth.

Yes, but if you had invested it in crypto, then it would have been worth $3.4 million... er.. $600k... no $4.55M!!!  er wait... $200k.. um.. and now it's $0...

And your crypto site is now bankrupt and people are going to jail...

 

Hope you enjoyed the ride!