Atari Games

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Atari Games

logo
legal form Corporation
founding July 1984
resolution February 2003
Reason for dissolution Dissolution by the parent company
Seat Milpitas , California , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
Branch Information technology
Website www.agames.com

Atari Games was an American manufacturer of arcade machines and computer games . It is one that in June 1984 from the split of the computer game pioneer of two companies Atari, Inc. has emerged. In the course of its existence, the company changed hands several times. It operated temporarily under the name Time Warner Interactive and finally in 1998 until its closure in 2003 as Midway Games West .

Company history

Atari, Inc. split up and sold off by Warner

After the original Atari, Inc. generated profits for many years, the operating crash followed in 1983 when the company made a loss of 538.6 million US dollars. Atari's parent company Warner Communications lost around a billion US dollars as a result of its stumbling daughter and had to fight off a hostile takeover attempt by Rupert Murdoch at the end of 1983 . In July 1984 Warner Communications therefore sold parts of Ataris to Jack Tramiel , the founder and recently ousted managing director of the computer manufacturer Commodore . Tramiel, the company acquired solely with debt amounting to 240 million US dollars. Tramiel was considered to be the main cause of Atari's financial crash, with its price war, which was fierce in the Commodore era. However, when he lost the power struggle with Commodore's shareholder Rick Goulding and had to leave Commodore, he took over Atari's console and computer department in order to position it as a competitor to Commodore under the company name Atari Corporation.

The department for amusement arcade machines and Atari's telephone development department Ataritel, which made up about 20% of the original company, remained with Warner Communications. The manufacture of arcade machines has since continued under the name Atari Games Corporation. An agreement between Warner and Tramiel stipulated that the company could continue to use the old Atari logo, but only with the addition of games. In addition, it was only allowed to sell arcade games under this name, with the exception of publications for computers and game consoles. At the beginning of the separation, Atari Corporation and Atari Games continued to share the same office building at Atari headquarters in Sunnyvale . The company later moved to Milpitas .

In February 1985, Warner and Namco reached an agreement for the Japanese games company to acquire a majority stake in Atari Games. Namco, which was still entitled to license fees from Warner from the Pac-Man deal with Atari, Inc., acquired 60% of the shares in Atari Games for ten million dollars. The company became a branch of Namco America under the direction of Hideyuki Nakajima.

Return to the end customer market

The synergy effects that Namco had hoped for did not materialize, which is why Namco founder Masaya Nakamura sold 20% of his company shares back to Warner and to a group of Atari Games employees under the leadership of Nakajima at the beginning of 1987. In 1990 Atari Games also acquired the remaining shares in Namco. Hideyuki Nakajima then endeavored to bring Atari Games' games back to the consumer market. H. for game consoles and home computers. However, since the contract with Tramiels Atari Corporation excluded the distribution of computer games under the Atari logo, Nakajima created a new subsidiary called Tengen in 1987. The term Tengen ( 天元 , "middle of the sky"), like the name Atari, has its origin in the Japanese board game Go , where it describes the center of the game board.

Until around 1991, Atari Games was considered by some critics to be one of the most creative game makers for arcade machines. The company could u. a. celebrate with games like Marble Madness , Gauntlet , Rampart or Paperboy . Features for slot machine games from Atari Games were for example:

  • mostly renouncing common genre conventions
  • stronger focus on procedurally generated or very variably designed game worlds instead of prefabricated levels
  • Level warp for experienced players
  • POKEY sound
  • the Atari font consisting exclusively of caps in a 16 × 16 pixels large, monospace - serif
  • the Atari bell as a clue for entering the name for the credits
  • Highscore lists per coin slot

In October 1991 Tengen signed an agreement with the Japanese console manufacturer Sega to develop 40 games for all Sega platforms.

Arguments with Nintendo

In the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Atari Games led two significant legal disputes with the Japanese console manufacturer Nintendo . The first concerned the control Nintendo had over third-party software releases on the Nintendo Entertainment System . Since Nintendo identified the poor quality of some game releases as a major cause of the video game crash , the console manufacturer tried to counter this with a quality guarantee. Nintendo tried to enforce this against third-party providers with a control chip (so-called 10NES, also referred to as a "lock-out chip" in reports), which could only be installed by Nintendo and without which a game module from the console could not was accepted. Nintendo also imposed strict rules on third-party providers, including: a. the limitation of new publications per year to a maximum of five titles and a two-year exclusivity for the NES. Since Nintendo dominated more than 80% of the market at this time, there was no getting around a license agreement for Atari Games or its subsidiary Tengen. All attempts to negotiate special conditions failed.

After signing the license agreement, Atari Games began looking for a way to circumvent Nintendo's licensing requirements and the restrictions imposed by the control chip. First attempts to analyze the chip by reverse engineering failed. As a result, Atari's legal department illegally gained access to Nintendo's 10NES plans when they made an affidavit to the United States Copyright Office that they needed the document in a bogus copyright litigation between Nintendo and Atari Games. In 1988, Tengen published its only three Nintendo-licensed titles - Pac-Man , RBI Baseball and Gauntlet - before the company filed an antitrust lawsuit against Nintendo in December of that year for “ improperly using its patent and greater market share to monopolize the home video game market. ”(German:“ inappropriate use of their patents and their larger market share in order to establish a monopoly on the home computer games market ”). The company wanted to secure itself legally for its next step and in the same breath brought self-produced game modules onto the market via Tengen, which did not contain a control chip licensed by Nintendo, but an in-house development called Rabbit . Nintendo responded in January 1989 with a counterclaim that should exclude Atari Games from the development of NES games, while in February 1989 the Atari Corporation, independent of Atari Games, also sued Nintendo in this regard. Nintendo countered in November 1989 with another counterclaim for patent infringement and fraudulent appropriation of Nintendo's intellectual property. At the same time, Nintendo threatened all retailers who were supposed to sell Tengen software with legal action, whereupon many retailers banned the corresponding games from their shelves.

Atari Games lost the trial on September 10, 1992 before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Case 975 F.2d 832 (Fed. Cir. 1992)). Although the court recognized that Nintendo could have abused its position and that the original attempt at reverse engineering fell under the principle of fair use , Atari Games had forfeited its right to claim for abuse of copyright due to the fraudulently obtained documents from the copyright authority. Instead, Atari Games itself violated Nintendo's copyright when it had the control chip reproduced with the help of the documents, including demonstrably unused code sequences from the original and although, according to Nintendo, there were other options for generating a corresponding data stream to unlock the lock. Atari was sentenced to pay damages.

The second judicial clash concerned the NES implementation of the computer game Tetris . The game, which is legally owned by the Soviet state corporation Electronorgtechnica (Elorg), was licensed to the publishers Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte through the businessman Robert Stein , although these contracts were only legalized afterwards, as Stein only signed the relevant signatures one month after the first products appeared Russia received. Spectrum Holobyte then licensed the arcade and computer rights for the Japanese market to the Nintendo-related developer Henk Rogers , while Mirrorsoft granted the same licenses to Atari Games / Tengen. However, none of the companies were aware that Elorg Stein had only transferred the rights for computer adaptations for the western market, but not for the Japanese market or handheld and home consoles. In a competition between the various companies, Nintendo, who wanted to promote the market launch of their Game Boy handheld console with this title, finally succeeded in securing the corresponding rights on March 22, 1988, leaving Atari Games, whose daughter Tengen was already developing a version of the NES had started receiving a fax on March 31 stating that the contract was being signed. Atari secretly applied for copyright to Tetris and released its version in May 1989; a month later the Nintendo version appeared. While the Tengen version developed by Ed Logg was judged to be of better quality (including an additional two-player mode), Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tengen. Judge Fern M. Smith, who also presided over the "lock-out chip" process, accepted Nintendo's request for Atari's game modules to be recalled due to the clear evidence. In the end there was no more trial; on November 13th, Smith ruled that the rights to Tetris were owned by Nintendo; Atari Games had to crush its version of Tetris . Nintendo ultimately sold three million copies of the game for the NES and, as a supplement to the hardware, 40 million for the Game Boy.

Gradual decline

Starting in 1992, Atari Games' star gradually began to decline. The company succeeded less and less in convincing the Beat 'em ups of the competition (e.g. Street Fighter ) with innovative ideas . The North American market for arcade games also continued to shrink. In 1993 Time Warner took over a controlling majority in Atari Games, and on June 11, 1994 long-time managing director Nakajima died of lung cancer. From April 1994 the company operated under the name Time Warner Interactive, the names Atari Games and Tengen were given up. In March 1995, Time Warner announced that it would sell its remaining stake in Atari Games in order to reduce the group's debt level. In May 1995, Dan Van Elderen, previously employed by Atari, Inc. and Head of Development at Atari Games in the 1980s, was named President and COO of Time Warner Interactive, having previously held that position for the Retail division (Tengen). In March 1996, the US game company WMS Industries published a notice that it would take over Time Warner Interactive. Since WMS had no rights to the name Time Warner, the company operated again under its original name Atari Games until 1998. Within the group, the company was part of the Midway Games division , which WMS went public in October 1996. The previous production site for arcade machines in Ireland was sold to Namco. In 1998, WMS Industries sold its remaining shares in Midway Games, and in the same year Atari Games was renamed Midway Games West. However, the name for publications in the arcade area was retained for the time being. In 1999, San Francisco Rush 2049, the last arcade game to be published under the Atari Games logo, appeared, and in 2001 Midway completely gave up the business with the coin operated machines. Midway Games West initially limited itself to developing computer games until the studio was closed in February 2003. After the bankruptcy and break-up of Midway Games in 2009, Time Warner and its subsidiary Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment took over a large part of Midway's brands and licenses, including the naming rights Atari Games.

Published games

As Atari Games

As Tengen

Tengen produced both Nintendo-licensed and unlicensed titles for the NES, the only officially licensed games being Gauntlet , Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , Pac-Man and RBI Baseball . The unlicensed modules differ from the official half-square, gray Nintendo modules by their rounded corners and matt black color, which was based on the original Atari game modules.

literature

  • Steven L. Kent: The Ultimate History of Video Games . Three Rivers Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-7615-3643-4 , pp. 388 .
  • Dietmar Bertling: Coin-Op . Scriptorium-Verlag, Morschen 2013, ISBN 978-3-938199-20-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roger Cohen: The Creator of Time Warner, Steven J. Ross, Is Dead at 65 ( English ) In: The New York Times . December 21, 1992. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  2. ↑ COMPUTER: Business is war . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1984 ( online ).
  3. ^ David E. Sanger: Warner Sells Atari To Tramiel ( English ) In: The New York Times . July 3, 1984. Retrieved June 6, 2013.
  4. ↑ Time Warner to Sell Part Or All of Its Stake in Atari ( English ) In: The New York Times . March 25, 1995. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  5. ^ Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , p. 269
  6. ^ Warner to Share Unit with Namco ( English ) In: The New York Times . February 5, 1985. Retrieved June 6, 2013.
  7. ↑ Bertling, Coin-Op , 126-127
  8. ↑ Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , p. 371
  9. ↑ Bertling, Coin-Op , p. 133
  10. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/27/business/briefs-399590.html
  11. ↑ Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , pp. 371-372.
  12. ^ A b John Harris: Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games ( English ) In: Gamasutra . UBM, plc . May 30, 2008. Retrieved June 8, 2014.
  13. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-31/business/fi-970_1_video-game-formats
  14. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/31/business/company-news-nintendo-says-game-sells-well.html
  15. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.1up.com
  16. ↑ a b Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , pp. 372-373
  17. ↑ a b http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-13/business/fi-193_1_video-game-market
  18. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-16/business/fi-369_1_video-game-market
  19. ↑ a b Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , pp. 373-377
  20. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-06/business/fi-321_1_atari-games
  21. ↑ Your move, Nintendo . In: IDG (Ed.): Computerworld . 23, No. 6, February 13, 1989, p. 105. ISSN  0010-4841 .
  22. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1989-02-01/business/fi-1393_1_video-game-systems
  23. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-30/business/fi-421_1_nintendo-entertainment-system
  24. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-15/business/fi-399_1_giant-nintendo
  25. ↑ Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , pp. 376-377
  26. ↑ Julie E. Cohen: Reverse Engineering and the Rise of Electronic Vigilantism: Intellectual Property Implications of "Lock-Out" Programs ( English , pdf) 1995. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
  27. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/14/business/chip-research-upheld.html
  28. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-30/business/fi-18550_1_nintendo-by-atari-games
  29. ↑ Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , pp. 377-380
  30. ↑ http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Time+Warner+Interactive+Promotes+Stephen+Wahid+To+Director+of+Product...-a017600204
  31. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/25/business/time-warner-to-sell-part-or-all-of-its-stake-in-atari.html
  32. ↑ http://www.thefreelibrary.com/TIME+WARNER+INTERACTIVE+APPOINTS+VAN+ELDEREN+AS+PRESIDENT+OF+ARCADE...-a016920416
  33. ^ WMS Industries to Acquire Atari Games Corporation
  34. ^ Atari Games Sold to WMS Industries
  35. ↑ Midway Games Form S-3 to the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated November 27, 2001
  36. ^ Leonard Herman: Company Profile: Atari . In: Mark JP Wolf (Ed.): The video game explosion: a history from PONG to Playstation and beyond . ABC-CLIO, 2008, ISBN 978-0-313-33868-7 , pp. 60 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  37. ↑ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1022080/000095012309009497/c51466exv2w1.htm