Atari Games

» see atarigames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

in turkish the word atari does not name a company. it names a room. an atari salonu is an arcade, and it stayed the word for one long after the machines inside had stopped being atari machines and had mostly stopped being licensed at all. that is the version of this brand i grew up with in the early nineties, a generic noun for a place with a token slot, with no company attached to it in anybody's head.

so the thing that died in 2003 is a company most people never knew existed, because the name had already come off it. atari games was the coin-op half. in 1984 warner communications broke atari inc apart and sold the home computer and console business to jack tramiel, who turned it into atari corporation. the arcade division stayed with warner under the name atari games. two companies, one word, no relationship between them.

the arcade half is the one with the better catalog. marble madness came out in 1984 and gauntlet and paperboy both landed the following year. hard drivin' in 1989 had a force feedback wheel and polygons nobody's home machine could touch. these were expensive cabinets built for an environment where a game had to be legible from across a room and had to take your money in under three minutes.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ownership ~

the corporate history is where this gets hard to follow. warner sold control to namco in 1985 through a joint entity, then namco sold its shares to a group of the company's own managers led by hideyuki nakajima, which left three roughly equal stakeholders and an unusual amount of independence. time warner took control back in 1994. wms industries bought the whole thing in april 1996 and it landed inside midway games when wms spun that off in 1998.

none of this changed what the building in milpitas did. it kept designing arcade hardware while the ownership above it rearranged itself every few years, which is a good description of how most of the interesting studios of that era spent the nineties.

~ the tengen war ~

in 1987 atari games set up tengen to publish on the nintendo entertainment system, and then decided it did not want nintendo's licensing terms. nintendo's cartridges carried a lockout chip called the 10nes, and tengen's lawyers obtained the chip's source code from the copyright office by claiming they needed it for a lawsuit that did not yet exist. tengen built its own version and started shipping unlicensed carts in black shells. that put the two companies in court for the next six years.

the tetris fight ran alongside it and was messier. the rights had been sublicensed through so many hands that both companies genuinely believed they had bought the console version, and tengen shipped its nes tetris in 1989 before a judge ruled that nintendo's chain of title was the real one. about a hundred thousand copies had already sold. collectors will tell you the tengen version plays better, with two-player and a proper music selection, and they are right, which does not change who won. everything settled in 1994.

~ the day it died ~

the arcade business in north america did not so much decline as evaporate. by the mid nineties a home console could do most of what a cabinet did, and the venues that had hosted the machines were closing faster than the operators could redeploy them. atari games kept going by porting its own arcade work to consoles, which is a much smaller business with much thinner margins and no hardware advantage.

on 19 november 1999 midway renamed the subsidiary midway games west, and the atari name stopped being used on anything. the studio carried on for another three years making home titles. after a bad stretch of sales midway shut the milpitas operation on 7 february 2003, taking about thirty jobs with it, and kept the shell as a holder for the old catalog.

the trademark itself had gone the other way long before, following the consumer side out through tramiel and eventually landing at infogrames, which is the atari that exists today. the company that made gauntlet is not that company and never was.

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