Atari has sold Shiny Entertainment o make some bling for the troubled publisher. Atari's accountants want to know, "Have you paid Atari today?" The former crown jewel in Atari's empire, producing one extremely popular Enter the Matrix game, and one ... not so much; The Path of Neo. While the popularity of the Matrix films can account for the high sales of the first game, its poor poor ratings and gameplay contributed to the low sales of the sequel. Atari got stuck with the bill after the acquired Shiny as a result.Even Dave Perry couldn't save Shiny, jumping ship back in February in order to help them land on their feet. While they were on the chopping block for months, they end up without Earthworm Jim which Atari will keep, at Foundation 9. The new owner is combining Shiny with their other development team, The Collective, to work on an undisclosed feature film game in 2007. Any ideas as to what that might be? Let's just hope it isn't an Iron Man game with Robert Downey Jr. providing the voice.
This wouldn't be the first case of a movie tie-in causing financial troubles for Atari. Way back in 1982, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 was released to extremely dismal sales and critical pounding. Atari printed four million E.T. game carts, but only sold one and a half million of them. To put it in perspective, more than ten million Atari 2600 consoles were in homes at the time, and they couldn't even sell half of what they'd printed. Which seems hard to do when you are selling a video game based on the most popular film of the year. The following year, Atari posted a loss of $536 million (1983 dollars!). As a direct result, Atari declared bankruptcy in 1984, and was broken up and sold in pieces. Many critics point to this as one of the biggest contributors to the video game crash of 1983. And thus ends the history lesson.
As far as Shiny, in a perfect world Atari would quitely go bankrupt (again), giving the Earthworm Jim license back as a last gasp, and we'd see that sequel finally.
