Atari Alumni

Atari, one of the world’s most recognized publishers and producers of interactive entertainment, and renowned MMO developer Cryptic Studios, have announced the availability of Season Two: Ancient Enemies, the latest content update for the Star Trek Online universe. Season Two: Ancient Enemies is available at no additional cost to current Star Trek Online players. The content update allows players to encounter and battle even more of Star Trek’s iconic races, and enjoy all new Episodes. Star Trek Online is also now available for a new low price of $19.99.

Star Trek Online’s Season Two: Ancient Enemies boasts the following new features:

A new level cap: players can now reach level 51. (The previous level cap was 45.) With the increase come new ranks within the Federation and Klingon factions.

All new rewards and content: including new Tier 5 ships, high-level versions of every Special Task Force mission and Fleet Action, and Mark XI gear rewards.

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It might seem hard to believe today, but back in 1982 the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was huge. It didn’t have the “teen appeal” of Titanic or Twilight, but it was the kind of movie grandparents, parents and church youth groups could feel good about taking their little ones to see. And so take them they did… and the movie became a phenomenon.

It only made sense, then, that there would be a video game tie-in based on the movie. Although newer systems like Activision offered better graphics than the stodgy Atari 2600, Atari’s gigantic user base ensured that the company would win the rights to make the game. When kids found out that E.T. the video game was coming out, they gleefully added it to their Christmas lists by the millions. E.T. was perhaps the hottest gift of the 1982 Christmas season.

There was just one problem… the game sucked. The graphics were so horrible and the gameplay so boring that even today, 27 years later, the game still makes it onto “Worst Video Games of All-Time lists”. In fact, given the game’s high-profile at the time, it often ranks near the top of those lists, too.

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Atari Cosmos is a prototype game that was pretty much finished, but Atari decided to scrap at the last minute. (Partly (if not mainly) due to the fact that it really does suck as far as a game is concerned. They claimed it was 3-D or holographic, when in reality it was just a small grid of LEDs (7×6) with a dual-image hologram used as a background. There were two lights inside of the game shining on the hologram at different angles, and that would cause one of two images to light up (in the case of the Space Invader game, there was a constant background, and when you died an image of an alien shooting you would appear). Eight games were developed (along with the holograms), and all of them were programmed into the base unit. A series of tabs on the ‘cartridge’ told the base unit which games to play. 6 Cosmos units are known to exist today, and 3 of those 6 are only empty shell mock-ups (although Atari made hundreds of the empty shells, it isn’t currently known if these were destroyed/thrown away, or if they are waiting to be found in a warehouse or garage somewhere…). One of the three working prototypes (and at least one of the mock-ups) belongs to Curt Vendel of the Atari Historical Society…

source: http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Atari/Cosmos.htm

Atari is finally bringing back its classic Haunted House  franchise for a new XBLA, downloadable PC, and Wii game. For those of you who aren’t ancient, Haunted House is a maze game about a kid exploring a mysterious mansion in order to put an urn back together, hindered both by aggressive ghosts and total inability to see items or exits without lighting a match.

The new version benefits from 29 years of technological advancement by, among other things, displaying the player avatar as a person instead of simply disembodied cartoon eyes.
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In the mid-1970’s the father of commercially successful video games, Nolan Bushnell was sitting on top of the world. A graduate of the University of Utah, Bushnell had just sold the company he had built, Atari, named for the Japanese word for “check” in the game of go, to Warner Communication for 28$ million. (Koerner, 1999) A November 15, 1976 Business Week headline proclaimed that “Atari sells itself to survive success.” (Atari sells, 1976) Indeed the small company was growing so fast that manufactures could not produce the internal circuits fast enough, as Edger A. Sacks, the vice-president of GI’s Microelectronics Group, explained “the trouble is that demand is 50% to 60% greater than anyone anticipated,” and in turn Bushnell could no longer continue to create the additional funds needed to overwhelm the competition and appease the demand. (Demand overwhelms, 1976)

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The real story of Asteroids, Pac-Man, Pong and Pole Position…

1 Nolan Bushnell, Atari’s founding father, originally named the company Syzygy (the sun, moon and earth in total eclipse). He renamed it Atari because another company already owned the name Syzygy.

2 Bushnell is generally believed to be the author of Pong, Atari’s first game. Actually, Magnavox released the Odyssey 100, the first home video game system, which included a game remarkably similar to Pong, several months before Pong’s debut in the arcades in 1972. The Odyssey 100 was invented by Ralph Baer.

3 Bally/Midway rejected Bushnell’s Pong when he demonstrated the game in its Chicago offices in 1972. Bushnell went back to California and started Atari.

4 Given a choice between Mappy and Pole Position, two arcade creations by the Japanese firm Namco, Bally/Midway amazingly opted for Mappy. Atari had to settle for Pole Position, which went on to become the biggest game of 1983.

5 Gravitar was one of Atari’s worst selling arcade games. So they took the game program out of the cabinets and converted them all into Black Widow.

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Atari, SA, one of the world’s most recognized videogame publishers, and much-acclaimed developer Eden Games, are proud to announce the newest installment in the legendary racing franchise with Test Drive® Unlimited 2 for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system and Windows PC coming Fall 2010.

Test Drive Unlimited 2 expands on the traditional racing experience providing gamers with M.O.O.R.®: Massively Open Online Racing®; immersing drivers in a persistent online environment and revolutionizing multiplayer racing communities as players compete, team up, and share their achievements and creations online. Unlike any other driving game, TDU2 blends the open world experience with realistic vehicles and performance dynamics and for the first time, TDU2 features vehicle damage, weather effects, day and night cycles, and a brand new island to explore.

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Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, has come back to the company as a member of its Board of Directors, IndustryGamers chatted with Bushnell on the phone to get his reaction to rejoining the company he’s best known for.

“It kind of is a homecoming. I think Atari has made some really nice strides in the last few years, and I feel like it’s the right time and right place,” he told us. “I’ve known [CEO] Jeff Lapin and some of the guys [for quite a while], and I bumped into them a few years ago at E3 and had some dialogue. It just all of a sudden felt natural I think for both sides.”

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Publisher Atari shrunk its full-year loss from 221.9 million euros ($272.4 million) to 19.4 million euros ($23.8 million), and saw a small profit of 3.8 million euros ($4.7 million)) in the second half of the year — thanks in part to Cryptic-developed MMOs like Star Trek Online and Champions Online.

The results demonstrate a dramatic improvement for the long-suffering company, whose attempts to usher in a post-Bruno Bonnell era have been stymied by crippling debt and the departure of notable execs/creators such as Phil Harrison and Paulina Bozek.
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Sony Pictures Animation picks up the rights to make a live-action film with CG elements based on Atari’s PC theme park simulation series.

To date, game-based films have inconsistent track records when it comes to critical and commercial success, but that could change with the wealth of gaming licenses optioned for the big screen lately. The Hollywood Reporter has said the latest game to get picked up for a feature film is Atari’s PC line of theme park simulators, Rollercoaster Tycoon.

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