BPN 1349 Back to the future (1): Atari

These are strange times: the French video game publisher Infogrames will rebrand the company as Atari and the veteran online company AOL and book and magazine publisher Times Warner look like they will disassociate. This is going back to the future of the nineties: the Atari era was over and content factories were the forecasted money spinners.

It is strange to see the French video game publisher Infogrames going back to the name of Atari. Of course the holding company of Infogrames is Atari. But Atari was ‘old hat’ by the mid nineties.

Infogrames has a long history as games developer and publisher. It was started in 1983 by the French whiz kid Bruno Bonnell together with Christophe Sapet and Thomas Schmider and grew by acquisitions from 1996 to 2002. In 1997 it acquired Philips Media and its CD-I game heritage and sold out the stock Philips had built up in expectation of the world success of CD-I, that never came.

And by 2002 the company published the game Enter the Matrix, based on the movies of the Matrix. It was also the time that Infogrames holding company, IESA bought Atari and branded it Atari Interactive.

In 2009 Infogrames is making another business turn and is branded Atari. What a move! Will it work? To start with the last question: going back to such a classic name will that work at all. We have a comparable situation with Commodore. Some years ago the name of Commodore was bought by computer builder Tulip, who started to build modern variations of the famous Commodore 64 to be linked up to TV and including a joystick. It did not appeal and in 2004 the brand was sold to Yeahronimo, an online music shop, and used for music devices. These devices flopped in the market as did the online music shop. The only thing visible of Commodore at present is the logo on the facade of an office at Baarn, next to highway A1 in The Netherlands. The owners saw more of judges than of consumers over the years, fighting in court bankruptcies.

What will be the fate of Infogrames as Atari. Will they become the new jaguar under the game consoles or will Infogrames continue to sell games, but now under the brand Atari. Changing the brand name looks like a trade trick for a company in bad weather. Atari was the name for the excellent hardware, which was bundled with games. As Infogrames is not selling game consoles, it will use the name Atari for selling games. This coupled with the historical lack of name recognition of the present game generation, it looks like the newly branded company Atari will even faster meet its fate: bankruptcy.

Blog Posting Number: 1349

Tags: games

BPN 1082 Commodore sinks further in the marshes

To some people it might be a surprise to hear that the veteran home PC brand Commodore is still around. One or two generations have grown up with the Commodore home PCs. It was a great experience. But after a few bankruptcies the brand Commodore goes downhill.

We moved as a family from the Netherlands to the UK in 1983 and lived in London. In 1984 I bought a Commodore 64 for the family. It was intended as an entertainment machine in the widest sense. Of course educational software packages were also used. We were used to PCs for professional usage since 1980, which were self-contained and floppy disc readers built-in. The Commodore 64 was a home computer with the computing part under the keyboard; it used the TV screen as a monitor. Software could be loaded from a floppy-disc drive or from a cassette player. We bought a lot of games and educational material for the Commodore 64 and still have the machine and the software in our little museum.

Eventually Commodore went bust. It had rested on its laurels, made the wrong choices and had not innovated in time. By 1994, the company went bankrupt, after that it had made a last attempt to introduce its version of the multimedia CD-ROM under the name CDTV, a competitor of Philips CD-i. CDTV and CD-I were both ignored by the market in favour of the multimedia PC CD-ROM. CDTV was ditched and the remains of Commodore, mainly the trademarks were acquired by the German computer shop chain Escom for 14 million US dollars in 1995; Escom went bust in 1996. In 1997 the Dutch company Tulip became the owner of the brand, but was too busy to do something with the brand. In 2004 it sold the trademark rights of Commodore International BV to music shop Yeahronimo for 24 million euro.

From 2005 to 2007 Commodore International BV applied itself to the development of media equipment for plying out music and movies. In 2007 Commodore was ready to launch its top product, the Gravel. But the equipment did neither sell well as it soon became known that there were problems with the equipment; the batteries emptied too fast and the music and movies were nor receivable by the equipment. The Commodore experience was not felt at all. Presently Commodore offers Golden Testsamples, but they still have to be tested by the buyers.

But the Golden Testsamples will hardly yield profits. Having spent 30 million euro for product development, the product might be finally ready and hopefully play without a hitch, in the meantime the price for media players has gone done so drastically that it will be difficult to make any profit at all.

Besides technical trouble the financial situation of the holding company does not look bright either. It has debts of over 36 million euro. The main claim comes from the Dutch computer manufacturer Tulip, which still wants to see 20 million euro.

On top of all this trouble one of the subsidiaries of Commodore International was declared bankrupt two weeks ago, but this ruling is being protested. Yet, the prospects for Commodore do not look healthy and whether the Commodore experience will be around again, will be most doubtful.

Blog Posting Number: 1082

Tags: entertainment, home computer, CD-ROM, CD-i, CDTV