Infogrames to complete Atari buyout
Majority shareholder wants the lot
FRENCH GAMES OUTFIT Infogrames intends to turn its 51.4 per cent holding in video games pioneer Atari into 100 per cent by offering shareholders $1.68 a share.
PC World has reported that the deal, which must be approved by shareholders, will allow Infogrames to "have more control over restructuring Atari to become a bigger player in the North American market."
The Lyon-based company will also give Atari a $20 million cash injection in the form of a loan to help it through the transition period.
Atari, which was once one of the biggest games hardware companies on the planet, was nearly killed off by the stampeding popularity of the original Playstation, and reinvented itself as a software-only brand in 2003. µ
Comments
how old are you?
" stampeding popularity of the original Playstation"Umm, dont you mean the original Nintendo, then Turbo Graphics 16, then Sega Genesis, then Super Nintendo, then finally Playstation.
I think there might have been a decade or so gap between Atari's systems and Playstation.
Hello?
Aren't you forgetting in the mix above the Atari Lynx, Jaguar and 7800???PS did kill them off
But I think that it was the Playstation that really buried the Jaguar-- Atari's final hope in the hardware market (and it was pretty well hyped at the time). Nintendo put Atari in a good chokehold, but it was Sony that really finished them off and made it apparent that Atari was no longer relevant in the HW market.psone
The original playstation was in development since 1986 (so says the gospel of wakypedia)so the sentence still stands.
Atari not bad...
IMHO, the best racing game ever made, Test Drive Unlimited (except for the bumpy roads), was made by Atari.Let's pray that Test Drive Unlimited 2 will still come out soon enough.
huh?
ummmhave you heard of the jaguar?
that came out around 94/95?
wasn't a bad system either hardware wise, just had crap games and little to no dev tools just killed it i think
What what
What? I don't get this.The old Atari is long, long dead. Infogrames bought the name and used it as a new worldwide face since they had dragged their own in the mud for so long. (Of course, they pomptly proceeded to devalue the Atari name too.)
I grew up during the 16bit wars
hmmm i remember it slightly differently...the turbo graphics didn't sell.
In 8bit times, you had the NES/mastersystem and the Sinclare/CommodoreVic20/C64/Tandy/Dragon/BBCmicro.
Then the console/computer 16bit wars kicked off between SegaMegadrive/SNES in the console corner, and the Atari,Amiga,PC & Mac in the computer corner
atari and amiga bit the big one when their computers couldn't out gun the consoles anymore. atari and amiga both saw the market going to the consoles, and produced the jaguar and CD32, but both were unfortunate flops. as by this time, Sega couldn't make up its mind with the MegaCD/32x/Saturn, the Sony Playstation was going great guns, and Nintendo had the vaguely successfull N64. I think some rouge beast named 3DO was alive around this time too.
Then PS2, Gamecube, Dreamcast pretty much killed off the alternative hobbiest computer market and left it open for the PC to fill the gap as Macs were just too expensive, and had no games available.
in your "decade gap", atari had the ST range, the TT workstations, and the promising Falcon - which suffered at the hands of the accountants - that could have been a contender...
i like the way you've just completely ignored a massive part of systems and market evolution that pretty much got us where we are today.
anyway, such is life...