http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/36...atari_.php

Gamasutra Wrote:(Page 1/23)

There goes the weekend...

Hehe. I didn't get very far.

Atari made many of the eternal classics of gaming and became hugely successful, but as many companies taken over by corporate management lost its karma and now spends its days suing kids that remake pong or asteroids.

They are a joke of a company now, a dead man walking. RIP Atari, in the tech biz you can't live on your brands forever (like say coca-cola does).

Well, to their credit, they did release Test Drive Unlimited relatively recently (year and a half ago?) and it is a spectacularly cool driving game, I must say. Poor Atari gets kicked around like a tin can nowadays, but they done did good with that one!

The interesting thing about that era is the lone-wolf doing all aspects of the game vs. Hollywood-like support staff for today's games.

GTA IV (according to Wikipedia) was made with 150 developers and >$100,000,000. Indie developers will find it hard to compete with those kinds of games.