/Still misses his 2600

Pac Man is Namco.

This is still somehow Nolan Bushnell's fault.

I'd love to buy some white pills off of Ms. Pac-Man, then go ape on some ghost with my RPG launcher.

This is still somehow Nolan Bushnell's fault.

You sure it's not the work of Howard Scott Warshaw?

WoW, WoW

If we allow game companies to lose money, it means Jack Thompson wins.

The real story behind Ms. Pacman. Not safe for work if you happen to work with prudes.

Maybe it's because they make games like "Indigo Prophecy" and "Dragon Ball GT: Transformation"

/seriously, WTF?

Better start mixing the concrete.
/Damn I hate that game

Midway produced Pac-Man.

I think Bill Orielly's France Boycott is really working.

Kudos to submitter.......totally off-the-wall headline! The best!!

I'll tell you why.

Indigo Prophecy.

That game SUCKED. MAJOR ARSE.

Get it right, Pac-Man was made from Namco, NOT ATARI.

Atari is long dead, now it's Infogrames which bought the Atari name a while back, no connection at all to the former Atari.

The Licensor was Namco.

stoneycase - I'll tell you why. Indigo Prophecy. That game SUCKED. MAJOR ARSE.

Whaaaa? I thought it was a great game. I played it through pretty fast because I couldn't stop playing it. My wife liked the story enough to sit on the couch and watch me play. She said it was like a movie. Why didn't you like it?

If it gets any worse, they're going to start having to bury games in New Mexico again.

I kid, I kid.

They'll donate them to orphans.

Gormenghast: Better start mixing the concrete.


"In order to keep the site from being looted, steamrollers crushed and flattened the games, and a concrete slab was poured over the remains"

So what if it gets looted? It's not like they were selling anyway.

This is not our Atari. This is the French Infogrames. They changed the name to attract American gamers. And, by the numbers, also wanted to follow a poor business model and be associated with failure. Mission Accomplished.

The current Atari has didly-squat to do with the Atari of the 80's.

It's just Infogram who bought the name.

and Ms. Pacman is from GCE, NOT Namco or Midway. Check the arcade code inside your MAME roms for the secret message in there :)

Slightly O.T., but how come in about every movie or TV show that has a video or computer game being played, the foley artist uses a soundbite from Atari 2600 Pac Man as the sound effect?

I worked there until they laid me off earlier this year. Let me say this news does not surprise me AT ALL.

(That said, I place no blame on any of my coworkers who were there with me, as they did (and do, I'm sure) yeoman's work and we were all too far down the food chain to elict any positive change.)

PREEMPTIVE STRIKE!

Easiest way to explain this:

My girlfriend just said "Atari still makes stuff?"

Note to the Idiots at ATARI:

REMAKE THE DAMN GAMES THAT MADE YOU BILLIONS BEFORE

PS/XBox versions of:

Missile Command
Battlezone
Tempest
Asteroids
Yars' Revenge, etc.

...and not just an updated Adventure



/props to THE ONION

Its Atari in Name only.... I miss my Atari 800 and Bruce Lee, and Rescue on Fractauls

As was said before, this is not the Atari of old, that company that was founded by Nolan Bushnell and released Pong into bars across America.
It is not the company that was a subsidiary of Warner Communications that made arcade machines, video game consoles and primitive (though cutting edge for their day) home computers.
It is not the company that Jack Tramiel drove into the ground selling very nice but poorly marketed computers, though they were popular with musicians and Europeans for a time, along with the Lynx and Jaguar.
It is not the company that was briefly owned by Namco before becoming the west coast development office for Midway Games, which was finally closed a few years back.

What we have here are the remnants of the consumer products software library and trademark, previously owned by Red Rocket, Hasbro, and now owned by Infogrames. So no, Atari as it once was no longer exists, it is only a label and an archive of outdated products being exploited by another company. See also Bell+Howell. A similar but less interesting story.

Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga Wugga ....

So who owns the rights to the whole ATARI back-catalogue ???

This is classic Atari.

Get your manual here

I noticed that about the atari pac-man. Circuit city is notable for using the sound effect as well.
/owns one of these
//and a 2600

rocinante721: So who owns the rights to the whole ATARI back-catalogue ???

Arcade games that were not licensed redistributions from froeign companies (e.g. Namco) are now owned by Midway Games.

Titles first relaesed for consumer systems (the 2600/VCS, 5200, 7800, Jaguar, and Lynx, and the home computers) again barring titles licensed from other companies, are now owned by Infogrames.

Some of the very early titles, like Pong and Breakout, though they were initially arcade games I'm fairly certain went with the consumer products side when the company was divided at it's time of sale from Warner Communications.

No jokes allowed unless they strictly conform to the facts!!!

Midway, Namco, Atari, France blah blah.....just shut up.

Anyways, since when did factual information rule fark?

kayoteq: This is classic Atari.

Hey! I have one of those! Got it at a garage sale manu moons ago for $1.

Actually it's a Sears Telegames version. Sears had a cobranding agreement with Atari in the early days, for these single game systems and later units up to the VCS (renamed the 2600 later on). It was identical except for the Sears label and a white panel in the middle.

Blah. Atari sucks.

They bought out Quicksilver when they were in the process of making Master of Orion 3. Atari then demanded major changes to the game infurated the lead designer to the point where he quit and took half is staff with him. The game was continually pushed back coming out almost 9 months after the original planned release date with major bugs and a horrible interface. Word of mouth quickly spread, and sales tanked after the first week. Atari then released one half-assed soft patch (they just tweaked the open source files which anybody had access to as long as they had a fancy program like MS Word or even Notepad), and one quarter-assed code patch which created more bugs than it fixed. Atari then decided the game was a lost cause and abandoned it.

They took one of my favorite game series' and ran it into the ground. For that reason alone, they will never see a dime out of my pocket again.

Infogrames bought out Atari and made it even worse. Infogrames won't even get pictures of the money in my pocket.

/wonders when it became an acceptable industry standard to release rubbish

Maybe the white panels were under the paddle knobs. I'll have to take it down from the closet to check.

I looked forward to MOO3 so badly. MOO3 was run into the ground worse than that Itanic CPU. I was so mightly disappointed.

Infogrames should give all their money to Ubisoft. End of Story. Makers of the new Prince of Persia games, those games with Sam Fischer (what were they called?), etc. Those, my friends, are good games.

Atari is long dead, now it's Infogrames which bought the Atari name a while back, no connection at all to the former Atari.

Well, one connection is the still-shiatty sales. :)

Thanks, Thalarion, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone mentioned that.

That 5200 Trak-Ball controller was nearly as big as the console its self. The 2600 Trak Ball was a nice little unit, though still large by modern standards, and had some clever joystick emulation that let you play Centipede the way it was meant to be played.

Missile Command, Tempest, Asteroids, and Battlezone, have all been remade. Didn't exactly work.

Looking at what makes the atari 5200 supersystem so super you got to love that the baseball game in the picture is simply called "baseball". Not "Extreme Yankee showdown 2005" or something like that just "Baseball". There is something communistic about that.

Yes I am really tired...