Future Potential Acquisitions?

[Bakasama]

I remember there some bad blood between Atari SA and company that has the license to Battlezone. Which why some of us keep mentioning it.

[Video]

23 hours ago, Giles N said:

What was that…?

About 15~ish years ago, atari went bankrupt and began selling off ip to keep going. Don't think it was a lot, but battlezone was a casualty, and why you stopped seeing it in Atari collections.

[TopDrawer]

1 hour ago, Bakasama said:

I remember there some bad blood between Atari SA and company that has the license to Battlezone. Which why some of us keep mentioning it.

Wouldn't be surprised. Rebellion created a lot of bad blood with past comicbook creators that worked on 2000AD, after they bought the company's assets, over ownership disputes.

Grant Morrison: Rebellion Won't Answer Me on Zenith Rights (comicbook.com)

[r_chase]

I've said this before and I will say it again:
Atari should get a license to distribute the ZX Spectrum Next to North America..at the very least.

But if I wanted Atari to acquire something, it would probably also be a license from Bandai Namco so they can re-release the 2600 version of Galaxian...or maybe even Dig Dug.

[82-T/A]

Oh man... a MicroProse buyout would be amazing.

 

Not sure what that would look like, or what would make fiscal sense... but damn, I'd love to play F117A on my VCS... haha...

 

 

I am really excited about the Night-Dive acquisition... and all of what may come from it.

[famicommander]

On 6/20/2024 at 2:52 PM, r_chase said:

I've said this before and I will say it again:
Atari should get a license to distribute the ZX Spectrum Next to North America..at the very least.

Why on earth would they do that? The Spectrum has pretty much zero visibility or following in the US. Even stuff like the Amiga, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 400/800 are all but forgotten here.

[r_chase]

12 minutes ago, famicommander said:

Why on earth would they do that? The Spectrum has pretty much zero visibility or following in the US. Even stuff like the Amiga, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 400/800 are all but forgotten here.

I'll humor you for a sec and remind you that THE400 Mini is still a thing. Also..

>amiga
>forgotten

It's like as if you just came back on here to start some trouble. Don't you have better things to do at the moment?

[famicommander]

1 hour ago, r_chase said:

I'll humor you for a sec and remind you that THE400 Mini is still a thing. Also..

>amiga
>forgotten

It's like as if you just came back on here to start some trouble. Don't you have better things to do at the moment?

Those are all niche products and the Spectrum is a minuscule niche within that niche in the US. How many Atari 400 Minis do you think they have sold? Because however large or small that number is, the market for the Specturm is a tiny fraction of that.

[r_chase]

1 hour ago, famicommander said:

Those are all niche products and the Spectrum is a minuscule niche within that niche in the US. How many Atari 400 Minis do you think they have sold? Because however large or small that number is, the market for the Specturm is a tiny fraction of that.

Okay, from a casual consumer standpoint, yes, the Amiga is a niche product, but from a music producer and hardcore gamer's standpoint at the time...it was highly sought after...before the first Windows 95 computer was release even.

Also, isn't retrogaming in general a niche thing? I get that the Speccy is mostly popular outside the US, but at this point, it sounds like you think you're right all the time. Should I bring up the word you said before you backpedaled: "all but forgotten"? Thus implying niche means forgotten.

Edited June 23 by r_chase
Grammatical corrections.

[famicommander]

3 hours ago, r_chase said:

Okay, from a casual consumer standpoint, yes, the Amiga is a niche product, but from a music producer and hardcore gamer's standpoint at the time...it was highly sought after...before the first Windows 95 computer was release even.

Also, isn't retrogaming in general a niche thing? I get that the Speccy is mostly popular outside the US, but at this point, it sounds like you think you're right all the time. Should I bring up the word you said before you backpedaled: "all but forgotten"? Thus implying niche means forgotten.

I didn't backpeddle at all. These are not popular products in 2024. 

 

Yes, retro gaming is a niche thing. The Atari 2600, Genesis, NES, and Super Nintendo sold a minimum of 30 million units each and even those are niche in 2024. The Atari 400/800, the Amiga, and the Commodore 64 sold a tiny fraction of what those platforms sold, and the Spectrum in the US sold an insignificant fraction of what those other PCs sold.

 

Just because the community that does exist for these platforms remains passionate doesn't mean there are nearly enough people to make it a smart business decision to try to monetize the Spectrum in the United States in 2024. If you asked 100 NES or Atari 2600 owners in the US, there's a decent chance that 0 of them have ever heard of a ZX Spectrum in their entire lives.

[Razzie.P]

50 minutes ago, famicommander said:

If you asked 100 NES or Atari 2600 owners in the US, there's a decent chance that 0 of them have ever heard of a ZX Spectrum in their entire lives.

I'll do that tomorrow.  Could be kind of neat.   I'd say you're right... I've been involved in gaming since I was a wee feller in the 70's and I don't think I heard of one until I was an adult and frequenting places like this.

 

Edited June 24 by Razzie.P

[famicommander]

24 minutes ago, Razzie.P said:

I'll do that tomorrow.  Could be kind of neat.   I'd say you're right... I've been involved in gaming since I was a wee feller in the 70's and I don't think I heard of one until I was an adult and frequenting places like this.

 

I grew up in the 90s and I've always been a huge gamer. I never heard of the Spectrum until the mid 2000s when I joined Neo-Geo.com, and that's only because there's a German moderator there who is obsessed with the platform and talks about it constantly to this day. 

 

It's not like I only went for the major systems, either. I have a 3DO, CD-i, Wonderswan Color, Watara Supervision, Virtual boy, N-Gage QD, Lynx, Jaguar, Jaguar CD, Vectrex, 5200, 7800, XEGS, Turbografx-16, Neo Geo MVS, Neo Geo CD, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Pokemon mini, SEGA Nomad, 32X, Odyssey 2, Coleco Vision, Intellivision, etc, etc, etc. And despite that level of irrational dedication to our silly hobby I still went the first ~20 years of my time on this planet having no idea there was ever such a thing as a ZX Spectrum. It just wasn't part of the culture in the US.

[ubersaurus]

My pie in the sky list would probably include the rights for games where the owners aren't doing anything with them and are probably low key enough to not be exorbitantly priced - something like the Channel F rights from Zircon, or Exidy, Ramtek, Astrocade's game rights that were independent of Bally (which presumably are with Warner now), Imagic (since as far as I can tell, Activision may not actually possess the rights to any of them). Some of the weirder-yet-prolific 70s game devs like Chicago Coin or Allied Leisure would be rad. And of course resecuring Battlezone would just be great. Lot of good material to mine for reissues or remixes out there even within what they already own, of course, but damned if I wouldn't love to see a Digital Eclipse take on the Channel F.

[zzip]

12 hours ago, famicommander said:

I grew up in the 90s and I've always been a huge gamer. I never heard of the Spectrum until the mid 2000s when I joined Neo-Geo.com, and that's only because there's a German moderator there who is obsessed with the platform and talks about it constantly to this day. 

 

It's not like I only went for the major systems, either. I have a 3DO, CD-i, Wonderswan Color, Watara Supervision, Virtual boy, N-Gage QD, Lynx, Jaguar, Jaguar CD, Vectrex, 5200, 7800, XEGS, Turbografx-16, Neo Geo MVS, Neo Geo CD, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Pokemon mini, SEGA Nomad, 32X, Odyssey 2, Coleco Vision, Intellivision, etc, etc, etc. And despite that level of irrational dedication to our silly hobby I still went the first ~20 years of my time on this planet having no idea there was ever such a thing as a ZX Spectrum. It just wasn't part of the culture in the US.

Yeah pretty much,  I had several computer magazine subscriptions in the 80s, and I never heard of the ZX Spectrum either,  not until I go involved in the emulation scene in the 90s.

 

The closest we had in the US was the Timex Sinclair 1000, but that was short-lived and mostly forgotten.

[CharlesEChuck]

...

Edited June 24 by CharlesEChuck
Don't know how to delete the comment

[TopDrawer]

Seems this could be the perfect time to buy back Alone in the Dark. 

If Atari has the money to do so, obviously.

Looks like Embracer's plans to revive the franchise didn't pan out the way they wanted.

Embracer Shuts Down Alone in the Dark Developer Pieces Interactive - IGN

Edited June 24 by TopDrawer

[CharlesEChuck]

On 6/14/2024 at 11:31 PM, Giles N said:

I think they are owned or distributed by some publishing company called Pixel Games UK.

 

https://pixelgames.uk/games/

A few hours ago a dude on the retrogaming subreddit said that he was "offered many (all?) of the Epyx titles with source code and verifiable chain of legal ownership."

 

I have no idea what's behind it, but if there is any truth in the story that this catalogue is actually on the market, I would be extremely surprised if Atari wasn't interested, given the Lynx connection and the recent buzz around Atari's trademark filing of "Rogue" which was developed by Epyx and is published by Pixel Games. I would love to see an Epyx Gold Master by DE or a California Games remake.

[MASTER260]

They should buy BBG so all of Intellivision's stuff is under 1 roof again.

 

Quote

-Midway games library

 

Also this, so all of Atari's stuff is under 1 roof.  Netherrealm Studios & Mortal Kombat are too important to WB I think, so I don't see that happening, though.

Edited Thursday at 12:26 PM by MASTER260

[Maztr_0n]

On 6/14/2024 at 3:15 PM, Giles N said:

This could only hapoen if you added some 0’s to Atari total value… even then, I see no possibility Atari could get MK unless they get extreme economical growth the next decade, or the holders now goes into a complete breakdown, which would, I guess, only happen if new big video-game industry crash happened.

i get that but also... TBH I STILL WANT ATARI TO BUY BACK DRIVER FROM UBISOFT

THEY'VE DONE NOTHING WITH DRIVER SINCE THE 2000'S last time they used the IP was IN 2014, 10 years ago... FOR A MOBILE GAME NOBODY CARED ABOUT, and ya can't get san francisco anymore so, god damn it, right the wrongs of the past, get Tanner back!

 

also idk who owns crawfish but getting them, AND DRIVER... my god... Driver GBC to 7800...

Edited Friday at 12:30 AM by Maztr_0n

[TopDrawer]

Been thinking about this recently, it's gonna be an odd take but hear me out.

Considering that Nightdive has a great track record when it comes to remaster classic Acclaim games, specially the ones based on the Valiant Comics properties they once owned - Shadowman, Turok (although, Valiant/Acclaim never actually owned the rights of the Turok IP, now they're fully owned by Universal) - why not just buy whatever's left of Valiant Entertainment?

The company has been in a dire state ever since the Bloodshot movie failed hard. They've been reduced to a licensing company basically. They've shut down their own publishing arm and licensed out comicbook titles to some other unknown company.

Atari could scoop those properties up at a bargain price and transfer the rights to Nightdive. Let them go ham, maybe release a new Shadowman game or a remake built from the ground-up of the original title. Maybe new games based on other Valiant characters, like Bloodshot, XO Manowar, etc. There's also a lot of licensing potential, like merch, movie & show adaptations, etc.

On 7/4/2024 at 1:24 PM, MASTER260 said:

Also this, so all of Atari's stuff is under 1 roof.  Netherrealm Studios & Mortal Kombat are too important to WB I think, so I don't see that happening, though.

WB has tried to get rid of their game division, even before the Suicide Squad failure. But I agree, realistically I don't think they would be dumb enough to let the MK franchise slide. They've invested a lot in the game and other non-game projects (movies, etc). Unless some big company like Amazon, Microsoft, Sony steps in and have the means to buy it.

Although, if things go well, I could probably see Atari try to acquire the non-MK related classic Midway properties in the future, considering that WB have done nothing with those titles ever since they acquire them.

I'd love to see Atari get their hands back on the Gauntlet franchise and re-release Gauntlet Legends, that game is fantastic and deserves a proper re-release, with an online mode and all.

Edited 7 hours ago by TopDrawer