Atari has made an agreement with veteran games developer Chris Sawyer to acquire his iconic management game Transport T…
  • GenitalHurricane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    1 month ago

    Worth mentioning to anyone who is excited for a possible new version of this title but hates AAA ethics, OpenTTD is FOSS and pretty good.

    Alternatively if you’d like a modern take on this, Mashinky is super good and was made by a 1-man studio. It’s also beautiful. (And multiplayer!)

    • Vikthor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      1 month ago

      The first thing that crossed my mind is that they might try to cancel OpenTTD. Chris Sawyer reportedly wasn’t too happy about OpenTTD but didn’t too much against it, maybe recognising that it is a fan tribute. Nobody can expect that of Ataris’s corporate lawyers.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    14·
    1 month ago

    I didn’t realize Atari owned most of those style games, they basically deadlocked that market to themselves, interesting

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    13·
    1 month ago

    For anyone going “Atari still exists?” - it’s complicated. And stupid. It is equal parts complicated and stupid.

    Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976 when they were still “that Pong company.” The home-gizmo division was sold to Jack Tramiel shortly after the crash of '83.

    The remaining arcade division took a journey. Tramiel had bought the name Atari, and also most of the staff and facilities and licensing rights, so Warner was left with a generic video-game husk which they spun off as AT Games, AKA Tengen. For some reason Namco owned most of it. Uuuntil Time Warner bought them back, and renamed them Time Warner Interactive, and then very shortly sold them to Midway, under Bally. Under Williams. That pinball conglomerate situation restored the proper Atari Games name, and then very shortly rebranded everything as Midway. This Atari did pretty well as Midway West until arcades stopped existing and they went bankrupt. And then Warner bought them again. They still own them, even though all Warner wanted was the Mortal Kombat IP.

    Meanwhile.

    The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers that do not matter in the slightest. Everything after the 2600 was a complete footnote. Their final lineup of the Lynx, the Falcon, and the Jaguar are only interesting to engineering ultranerds. Obviously they went bankrupt. Hasbro bought their remains, then spun them off into Mattel Interactive, which also went bankrupt. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought their remains (for some reason?) and did the smartest thing anyone has ever done with Atari: nothing.

    Infogrames screwed that up by buying JTS simply the acquire the Atari brand, which they proceeded to wear like a dead skin mask. They made a few admirable titles like Gauntlet Legends before entering a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent. It didn’t work. They went bankrupt. Some oil-adjacent venture-capital robot bought their remains, spent a decade hawking vaporware, released a weird PC nobody bought, and then also went bankrupt. A different clique of venture capitalists gave them more money, for some reason, and started reacquiring old franchises from all eras. They’re the Atari that re-released the 2600 last year, as if it’d be a big deal instead of a curiosity. I have obvious predictions for where this all goes, and yet, I cannot imagine that’s where it ends.

    That logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. Sensible companies see it laying there, and talk themselves into putting it on, and oh no everything went wrong somehow.