Atari, een naam die sommigen nog warme gevoelens geeft, voor anderen meer de vraag oproept of ze nog relevant zijn. De laatste jaren lijkt het bedrijf wat meer terug te krabbelen. Zo maken ze een nieuwe game in een klassieke serie, Bubsy 4D en kochten ze recent Thunderful Group. Tijdens gamescom zijn we in gesprek gegaan met de CEO van Atari, Wade Rosen, om dieper in zijn tijd bij Atari de plannen van het bedrijf te duiken.
DN : Thank you for your time. You have been the CEO of atari for a couple of years now right?
WR: That is riight. 4 years, a little over 4 yeah.
DN: Before you went to Atari, I find any history of you in the game industry, so I was wondering, how did you end up in this industry?
WR: Well, you’re right. I had founded a company before I came to Atari in the game industry called Ziggurat Interactive, which mostly focused on remasters and rereleases before that became a thing, but we the most well-known games that we worked on were Bloodrayne and A Boy and his Blob, but you know, really at a different level than Atari. But yeak I am here, I think because I love gigs, and it’s been a constant my whole life. I was in tech before this, I had, you know, quite a few careers before this, but ultimately, when I was asking myself what I wanted to do next, and I had the privilege and the opportunity to kind of choose what industry I want to go into next.
I realized that games have been the constant in my life everywhere I’d lived all these different phases of my life, games, were this positive force, and I never really had a job where I woke up and was just passionate to do something every day, it had always been an opportunity and like a market opportunity, but it was never something that I was deeply passionate or deeply resonant with me. And so I wanted to try, and you know, eventually that led you to Atari. And eventually, my relationship with Atari and becoming a large shareholder led me to be coming the CEO as well. So yeah, a little over 4 years ago.
DN: Okay, Atari is all about retro gaming at the moment. Are you personally more a fan of retro gaming as well and did it influence the direction of Atari.
WR: Yeah, yeah, very much. Well, I should say, mostly, I would say, I’m a fifty-fifty, but I spent a lot of time on retro gaming, you know, I’ve got a Polymega hooked up right next to a PS5, and I use them both. probably about the same you know and then the Switch 2 as well right?
Those are my 3 right? So if I’m half of the time traveling, okay, that’s the Switch 2. When I’m home, it’s really whether I want to have a weird like Death Stranding 2 experience, or I want to play like Panzer Dragoon Saga, or Snatcher, or you know, Ogre Battle or something, and I go back-and-forth, and I think a lot of it depends on how complex my life is.
Like the more complex things are, the more complex things are in my life, I oftentimes find myself going back to retro gaming and back to things that are a little bit simpler, and that I can just pick up and immediately start playing, and I don’t need to remember, you know, I don’t have a to-do list or a bunch of things like where was I? What was I doing here like? How does this control scheme work. There’s just an intuitiveness to it that is beautiful and timeless.
DN: So if you could choose one retro series franchise, that’s pretty much dead. Like doesn’t have any new games remasters, remakes or whatever recently, which franchise would you revive? From all IPs, not just Atari’s.
WR: So the challenge is there’s, I know a couple that I would love to do, but they’ve done some of the things in the series, but not all of them right? So I mentioned Panzer Dragoon Saga, but they did a remake of Panzer Dragoon, but they haven’t done. It nobody’s done anything with the second, nobody has done anything with Saga, no one said anything with Orta. I’d love to do something there.
I’m a big fan of Ogre Battle, but Tactics Ogre has been remastered several times. So a series that has had nothing nothing huh. I would say, personally, I would love to do… Oh man, that is so hard. I’m gonna put Snatcher and Policenauts in the same series and say that I would love to do you know, really bring Snatcher, and Policenauts and all the versions of Snatcher, because there’s like a lot of version of Snatcher, we never got in the west I would love. To do those, that would be amazing. Those games are so good, and they’re so inaccessible, especially Snatcher, given its price. To be able to bring that out to modern consoles, is that would be a that would be a real treat.
DN: I can really see talking with a passion for the retro games so that is great for Atari, but before you came the company had seen some turbulent years. Not really terrible, but a lot has happened and in general it didn’t feel like they had a clear goal. Making license deals all over the place. Like with casino’s, but after you arrived it changed a lot right?
WR: I mean, a lot of it, a lot of it is gone. We do still have a hotel license. No hotel has been constructed, the group that has that license is a really good group, you know, I mean, that’s third party, they’re great. If anybody can do it, they would do a great job with it. That predates me, but, you know, to my surprise, when I came in, I met them, and I was like, wow, this is actually there’s something here I don’t want to do away with this.
But I think, you know, holistically, yeah, a lot of the the licensing that wasn’t on brand isn’t really a thing for us. That doesn’t mean that we don’t, I mean, it’s a pop culture brand and that’s one of the beauties of it. So you know, we do licensing, people put it on shoes and energy drinks and headphones, and I like that, I don’t think anything will change with that.
But we want to make sure that like whatever comes out is good quality. That is representative of the brand, that it supports the brand, that it isn’t detracting from the overall message of the company. So licensing remains a viable part of the business. It’ll probably it’ll continue to increase as well, but yeah, we I would describe as maybe a little bit more thoughtful and intentional and less opportunistic.
DN : While you get a lot of brand awareness with licensing, with retro gaming, it might be hard to get new fans to join. Because 8-bit gaming is popular, of course. There are still popular indie games keeping that style whether it is 8-bit or 16-bit. However getting new players to retro games is harder. How do you think Atari can profile themselves well and attract new gamers?
WR: Getting new gamers, yeah, you know, we try. We try hard. I, how are we doing because there’s two, it’s interesting, usually people ask me, what are we doing or you know, and what I would say to that it is a lot of the original works that we do. You know, we’ve some examples would be Yars Rising, Missile Command Delta. Uh, Haunted House. How we’re doing with it, you know, it’s hit-and-miss, like every there are deep fans that emerge from all of these. i
In some ways, I feel something like Atari 50 might even be more impactful than some of the original works that we do, because it’s such a good game, and I’ve had a lot of people, a lot of people in their 20s or even younger tell me, oh my God, I discovered Atari through Atari 50, and now, I bought a 2600+ and now I’m collecting the carts and now I go to game stores, aand I buy Atari carts. These are people who were born after the 2600 was, I mean, I was born after the 2600 stopped being sold, but like these are people who were born decade and a half after the 2600 and are buying 2600 carts. That’s great.
That said, we will still keep trying to do original works and I think that’s probably the best way. I point to, the new adventure game we have coming out Adventure of Samsara, a really good game. It looks like a metric media, but it’s not it’s, you know, much more original. Actually, original is maybe not fair term, but it’s much more of A Prince of Persia meets Shadow of the Colossus kind of vibe, and it tries to do a lot of original cool things. The developer is very talented, the art style is great. But it still has that core adventure kind of this like loneliness and an esoteric nature of the original adventure is maintained there, and then maybe the biggest example would be Bubsy, which we just premiered during Opening Night Live.
And so far, it was the number three, most trending thing in America for like 6 hours after it came out. Not about gamescom, just in general, in America, like it outtrended Black Ops, and I mean, there was 20.000 posts or something crazy. So we look at that, and we’re like, okay. I bet we probably can get some new people on board with this, we just have to deliver a great game and make sure that it’s appealing to what people want today, and I think that’s probably it right. Making something great making something that can also appeal to multiple generations.
So it took me a second to get there, but I got there, that was the answer.
DN But you said something interesting about making new things. So Atari recently acquired a lot of shares from Thunderful. So is that acquisition also part of the strategy to attract a new group of customers?
WR: That’s great too. So we didn’t acquire the entire company, you know, so assuming that this vote goes through, we would become the majority shareholder of Thunderful, but I think we did Thunderful from a number of different angles. First, the company has primarily grown over the past 3 to 4 years in the US and we recognize that we don’t have enough on the ground reach here in Europe and that was actually one of the things that we identified, we were going to work on expandings.
By working with Thunderful and being to them, we immediately have a European based publishing team that has connections here that’s working with first parties on the ground here, it’s working with distributors, so that’s meaningful. The second thing is, you know, there’s some good developer teams there. For example; Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, good game, reviewed well. I think that team deserves to keep making games, they’ve made a great game. They made a really good game that I think even on the next one could be a great game, and so we want to find ways to work with them and then there’s the code sync team over in the UK that has done awesome work for you know, a long time now. And so we view it as just being very complimentary to what Atari’s doing.
If there’s any part, though, that would bring in, say, an outside group or a younger generation, I’d probably say, it’s the SteamWorld franchise, or some of the other IP there. We’ve done a lot of acquisitions, and I always get a lot of people reaching out to me, I don’t think I’ve ever had more people reach out to me than about SteamWorld, or about anything than they did about SteamWorld, that was wild. There’s a lot of fan love for that series, so yeah, I think the goal would be that it does bring some younger audiences to Atari.
DN: That makes sense as SteamWorld Dig was one of the first big breakout indie games way back when.
WR: Yeah, SteamWorld Dig. I mean, I played the the first thing on my Vita, I still remember that that was it an awesome experience. Although the second is, that’s the work of art.
DN: To start rounding off, I wanted to look a bit at the future. The future of Atari and pretty much how the world is the game industry is, what’s your look on this trends currently going on in the industry, AI, live service games. Do you think Atari will fully stay away from things like this for going to see like in live service Pac-Man, arriving anytime soon?
WR: So I I’ll kind of put AI to the side. So I’m not the person to speak to AI. I’m just not, even in our own company, people more knowledgeable are looking at that in a deeper way. It’s just not something that I really feel I can give a good viewpoint of the industry on, and I think the industry itself is still trying to figure out what it means that there’s obviously some really strong feelings and emotions around that.
Live service games on the other hand I do have, you know, some more I do have some opinions about that.I don’t think they’re good or bad. I mean, a lot of companies have made fortunes on it, on live service games, it does seem like people are tired. I think the challenge with live service games is that it kind of limits how many games you can play. Ultimately, you know, like the days of playing a game for 2 or 3 weeks and then going on to the next one and going on the next one. What happens is the live service game becomes your game and it does for years on end. But that doesn’really leave any room for new games or new live service games.
What we find is an ever more crowded live service field because the natural regeneration process that exists with standard releases doesn’t exist, because you’re not only you release a live service game competing against new live service games, but once from 10 years ago, you know or longer, and so it just creates an industry that can oftentimes feel stagnant I think.
It doesn’t make live service good or bad, and many people love them. It’s just for us, not really where we want to be right now with the exception of it’s a very successful mobile game we have, called Rollercoaster Tycoon, Touch. We really value that and value that community so we will continue to support it. But I think for the business as a whole, it’s just, we want to be releasing games into an industry that can renew itself and regenerate itself, and I just don’t see live services probably being that for us, at least at the moment.
DN: And what about like subscription services? I know you’ve been working with Antstream Arcade for example.
WR: Yeah We work closely with a lot, actually, you know, I think I think time will tell, but what I can say is our first party partners that we work with on those services, have been awesome to work with they’ve been very professional. They’ve like always treated us with respect and really been a joy to work with them. And we’d like to do more with them. I know, I mean, change is always difficult. What I’d say is part of the reason the industry feels so mature.
It is because the distribution mechanisms of this industry are very mature and I don’t know if subscription services are the answer. But I like anything that keeps distribution mechanisms fresh. I think in that you hopefully in the long run, have the ability to bring out new IP and take more risks and take some flyers. Do really innovative cool things. The distribution side of the business probably needs to shake up and it’s probably not one thing, but I hope his subscription services can help shake that up a little bit.
DN: To really finish up, you mentioned taking risks. Do you think there will be any chance Atari will ever make really a new console?
WR: What? we got this guy right here (points to the new Pac-Man Classic console) when you’re talking? No, I’m kidding. You mean like a modern console to compete with Sony and Nintendo?
DN: Not necessarily compete, but like, really a new model with a new name. Whether it is for modern gaming or just directed toward retro, but something really new.
WR: We made a modern console with the Atari VCS, about 4 years ago, what maybe 5 years ago now and unfortunately, there just wasn’t really the space in the market. I never say never, we love retro, we’re doing things like, could there be a space for something in the retro space, so I think there are great options in the retro space like Polymega, that already exist. We will probably on our hardware side really stick to what we’re good at for now, at the very least. Which is, we call it the plus ecosystem, but the 2600+, 7800+ maybe we’ll expand that ecosystem a little bit more.
But we love, we love taking what people had viewed in the past as uh, dead consoles or dead ecosystems and bring life back to them. I mean, people have been making the Atari 2600 games, really non-stop since the the console officially ended, but bringing it back officially, brings light to a lot of those creators and it shows that there still is a place for building within these predefined architectures. That sometimes doing that actually opens up creativity like work, you see that all the time in our working within predefined restraints and constraints actually expands the creative outlet that comes out of it, and I think that’s probably the hardware we’ll focus on for now, but never say, never right.
