Atari has revealed they will be reviving their old company name, Infogrames.
As reported by NintendoLife, Atari announced this in a tweet, and has now put up a page on their website dedicated to the Infogrames brand. The page says:
“Infogrames’ will build its portfolio primarily through acquisition. Over time, the portfolio may also include some of the legacy titles first published by Infogrames.”
Infogrames was founded in France in 1983, just over a decade after the founding of the original Atari in the US by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. As Infogrames, the company developed several original titles and published bigger games. Examples of their original titles include the first Alone in the Dark games and Asterix, on the NES, SNES, and Game Boy.
While they didn’t become as big as Ubisoft, they went through an acquisition spree from the 1990s through the 2000s, picking up other big name studios like GT Interactive, Ocean Software, Gremlin Interactive, and Hasbro Interactive.
As you may have expected, they ended up getting the Atari brand this same way, as Hasbro Interactive happened to own it. This happened because Atari itself went through a series of company closures and acquisitions.
The original US Atari was sold to Jack Tramiel in 1984, who promptly split their games and hardware divisions to Atari Games and Atari Corporation.
Atari Games would end up under Midway, which itself would shut down in 2003. After Atari Corporation itself closed shortly after the failure of the Atari Jaguar, its assets, which included the Atari brand, would make their way to Hasbro Interactive, and then Infogrames.
Infogrames rebranded themselves to Atari in 2003, and in spite of some other organizational changes through the past two decades, they have kept the name. But even Atari in 2003 is nothing like Atari in 2024, especially after acquiring the heavyweights in video game remakes and remasters, Digital Eclipse and Nightdive Studios.
Unlike the likes of Embracer and Electronic Arts, Atari doesn’t have incredibly huge modern games that overshadow their classic library. Instead, a lot of the money Atari makes on the video game side is mostly in rereleasing and remastering classic games.
That means they make money with a steady stream of smaller classic games, banking on nostalgia, in many ways copying part of Nintendo’s playbook. And now, it seems they have an interest in branching out with modern games. The first game confirmed to be going under the Infogrames label is Totally Reliable Driving Simulator, which, oddly enough, perfectly fits with the original French publisher’s branding in the 1990s.
While Atari already sold Alone in the Dark to Embracer, they do have quite a few classic games that could do better under the Infogrames label. We are looking forward to their future announcements in that direction.
