Atari has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire legendary port/remaster house Digital Eclipse. This is the latest of a long string of acquisitions made by the company.
This is perhaps the least surprising acquisition Atari has made in a while. Digital Eclipse are the developers behind Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, whose formula of contextualizing retro games with supplemental information was utilized in The Making of Karateka. The modern-day Atari (still technically a rebranding of Infogrames) is helmed by CEO Wade Rosen, who seems to have his eye on game preservation. Digital Eclipse is insisting that nothing is changing for them and that it’s business as usual.
Digital Eclipse has been around since 1992 and has always been mainly focused on porting games to other hardware. A lot of this was done during the days of the Game Boy line, when they would downscale console games for the handhelds. This is going to sound unflattering, but the game that comes to mind when I think of Digital Eclipse is Army Men on the Game Boy Color. Say what you want about the game. It was a pretty impressive translation of the PC title.
The rate of acquisitions going on in the industry is tiresome, but having tracked Atari’s movements for the past while, they don’t seem set on simply expanding their revenue. Interviews with Wade Rosen, like the one I did for Destructoid or this fantastic face-to-face video interview that Minnmax did, tend to frame the CEO as someone who’s trying to balance passion with business. Digging into the past seems like more than simply a way of turning a quick buck, but rather a real appreciation of the past.
Ew, this optimism feels gross. I need to retreat to comfortable cynicism. Wade Rosen travels the world and can probably afford to own a house. Also, the company hasn’t fully divested from its Web3 ventures.
Recently, Atari has been acquiring the back catalogs of some adjacent companies, has purchased the remasterminds at Nightdive Studios, and acquired retro databases MobyGames and AtariAge. They’ve been working with smaller studios to remaster retro games and have begun producing physical games for their old consoles. They have the Atari 2600+ and a series of new and reissued games coming out on November 17, 2023.
