TIL: Some Atari history...
Posted by
Mop (aka rburriel)
Jun 11 '20, 00:00
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With Warner hemorrhaging money in 1984, they decided to split Atari and sell it off. Jack Tramiel - who had previously founded Commodore - bought Atari Corporation. But Warner couldn’t find a buyer for Atari Games until Namco came around. Namco had previously partnered with Atari in Japan where Atari had created Atari Japan to sell arcade machines but couldn’t do it alone, so Namco had assisted. When that failed to save Atari Japan, Namco bought the company and got into the video game business themselves, and that’s why Namco is a video game stalwart today (Pac-Man and Tekken, for instance). Although Namco America bought 60% of Atari Games from Warner, parent company Namco in Japan saw Atari Games as a competitor, and spun it off, with Warner ending up back in control. Warner merged Atari Games with their European studio around 1996, creating Time Warner Interactive. But they almost immediately broke it up, with the European division being spun off as GT Interactive and the American division being sold to the parent company of Bally-Midway-Williams, who merged the assets with Midway’s gaming division (essentially, Mortal Kombat) and spun it off as Midway Games. They began to stumble in the 2000s and finally went into bankruptcy where it was bought by... Warner, who then merged the assets into... Warner Bros. Interactive. The assets of Atari exist today as part of the Warner Bros. Interactive juggernaut that controls properties as diverse as Mortal Kombat, the LEGO games, the Middle Earth games, and the Batman Arkham games. Warner just can’t quit Atari, having bought it and spun it off no less than 3 times.
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