Martyg

11 Million was to much, Infogrames essentially paid 11 million to buy back the lease on the name and properties. Atari Inc. had nothing, they were leasing the Atari name and old properties from Infogrames, they had sold off their development studios and most of their modern properties, there was only a handful of staff (less than 10). They had moved to a "publishing" only business model, only they had very little in way of a distribution network.

Just saw this, and quite frankly I'm surprised at the childish title and some of these responses. As stated in the article, they will be going in to software again as well (it also clearly states this on the website). There was no Microprose from 1999/2000 until just this past fall. The name and its properties were sitting languishing under Infogrames until they were all purchased by this group of gaming industry people. This is hardly a case of someone unrelated appropriating a "name" to bleed it. They chose to do consumer electronics based products to get a monetary base to relaunch the games. Unless you have a large parent company to start pumping wads of money for software development, you have to have some other means. Likewise, there is no "rebranding" or slapping of a name on someone else's product going on here these were designed from the ground up by the people involved in Microprose.

Guys, the whole thing is suspect. An unconfirmed rebuttal by an unnamed representative is any more telling than an unconfirmed mention of it being late? Likewise with the web site they recently threw up for the game. The most interesting bit of information - nowhere Atari Inc. found. Instead, the game's site and discussion forum is run by Infogrames' Atari Europe, a division of Infogrames. And a whois lookup on the web address registration also confirms this. The fact that it was a European website that was contacted also makes the announcement suspect that it came from anywhere within Atari Inc.

Relatedly, Infogrames announced earlier this month it was using recently fully subscribed bonds to relaunch its own publishing operation. Atari Inc.'s restructuring called for transfer of positions and assets to Infogrames, and elimination of all positions not needed for the new role as a simple publisher/distributor. Is the Alone in the dark takeover a sign of this? If AitD is finished and released via Infogrames and simply distributed by Atari Inc. in the US, that does nothing for its stock as well.

Ben - before you start talking about "uninspired" you should take a page from one of your own recent comments when someone questioned your case design for the GamePort - it's just a prototype casing. No artwork, coloring etc., not even the final layout. Just a plain molding to run tests with. As is mentioned in the Joystiq blurb above, the production model (complete with color, labeling, etc.) will look more like the woodgrain "spy shot" drawing posted here.

Conrad, that's not nitpicking and apparently the courts didn't think so either. Patents are a serious issue. Regardless, the error didn't originate with you it was in the original W3C announcement. Honestly, Alan was a great man with a lot of accomplishments. But in this field you deal with so much missinformation out there that starts with the most innocent of intentions. Next you're dealing with things like Galaxian being the first "color" game, or the Tramiel/Commodore/Atari/Amiga nonsense.

The claim was that he "helped invent the joystick" however. While Spacewar! is the first use of a joystick to control a computerized game, that hardly qualifies as the invention of the joystick. Likewise its not the first use of the joystick to control a graphical display. And we're not talking about aiprlane flight sticks (which its well known is where joysticks came from), the context is in regards to a controller for a computer based interface. Honestly, this was all covered years ago in court when some video game companies brought up Benjamin's patents (and Spacewar!) to fight Ralph Baer's patents and Magnavox's licensing suits. Spacewar! was not the first use.

While Alan's accomplishments are many, he and his team most certainly did not invent the joystick. That honor belongs to Ralph Benjamin, who developed it to control a graphical British radar system in the mid 1940's. This
gentleman was also the inventor of the trackball, all of which were patented back in 1947.