Atari er tilbage, ikke? Det legendariske spilfirma udvikler igen nye spil og lancerer ofte ny hardware - dog primært retro-inspirerede gadgets. Men betyder det, at Atari har ambitioner om at vende tilbage til toppen af spilverdenen og konkurrere direkte med Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo og de øvrige giganter i dag? Ambitionen findes måske i et vist omfang, men det er bestemt ikke dér, Ataris fokus ligger lige nu. Det bekræftede CEO Wade Rosen over for os under et interview på Gamescom.
Vi spurgte Rosen, om der overhovedet var en chance for, at Atari ville forsøge at konkurrere med de nuværende konsolproducenter og lancere en ny, moderne enhed. Hans svar var meget klart: det "absolut ikke". Fokus er fortsat på retroprodukter - især på hardwaresiden.
Rosen forklarede i sin helhed:
"Absolutely not. Absolutely. No, I want to look right in the camera and be very honest. Definitely not. We do not in any way compete with Microsoft or Nintendo or Sony. Great partners. No, I mean, we partner with them on a lot of projects. I'm always very careful to make that clear. No, we really love living in this space. I think the way we view it is like a lot of these classic consoles are viewed as dead consoles. They're viewed as legacy hardware. And what I realised just from myself, but also before coming to Atari and here, people are still making games for the 2600 and the 7800 and, you know, the Genesis and the Nintendo and the Game Boy. I mean, you can pretty much go to almost any, even the Jaguar and the Lynx have new games made for them. And so are these dead consoles or are these living ecosystems? And so that was really our desire.
"Like this first to give fans a way to play classic cards that doesn't involve, you know, a CRT television or a lot of modding and a retro thing trying to get this into a digital TV, but to really find an easy way to immediately dive back in to things that they love, to cards they have, and then to give the community more of an outlet to sell their, the games that they're making, to bring those to market, to have a bigger player base that can appeal to.
"So yeah, we treat it as a living ecosystem. And I think that's, I think of all the major game companies that have had hardware over the years, that's probably the innovation there is realising that these old systems aren't, are actually not dead at all, but they're living ecosystems. And if we want, we can bring them back and continue to function. And I think they have a place in modern society."
Du kan se hele interviewet med Rosen herunder, hvor vi også taler om Bubsys tilbagevenden, Ataris planer om at udvide klassiske licenser og meget mere.
