Atari CEO Wade Rosen insists that the company is committed to retro games.
The firm became a household name when they released their Atari 2600 console in 1977, with the likes of ‘Pong’, ‘Asteroids’ and ‘Space Invaders’ making them the most recognisable games company in the industry.
However, by the early 2000s, Atari had fallen into obscurity due to the success of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo's various consoles.
Now, Wade has emphasised the company wants to celebrate the extensive and historically important Atari archive.
He told GamesIndustry.biz: “As an organization when I came on board, the question was, 'What can we do better than anyone else in the world?' And we're not in a state to really compete with Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo, nor do we want to.
“So when we looked and asked what we could do better than anyone, retro was the thing that jumped out to us, at least at this stage in our history. So we just decided to be as great as we could at this very specific thing and that's what we've been focused on.”
The CEO also explained that the firm also recently acquired Digital Eclipse and Nightdive Studios to ensure the brand could unite retro gaming under one identity.
He said: “I think both [Digital Eclipse and Nightdive] share the same DNA with Atari of focusing on a niche and trying to be really good at something rather than trying to be OK at a lot of different things. That made it easy. And the fact that niche was in the same space we really want to be good at – these two are arguably two of the best retro companies in the world – it made a lot of sense to bring those together."
