Fuck "Atari".

I used to work for GT Interactive in the late '90s doing support. At the time we owned Atari and the entire back catalog, with the Atari dev team being 2 or 3 people in a small office in So. Cal I believe ( I was in the Seattle offices, so don't know for sure). I was there the day that Infogrames pres. Bruno came to check out our operation to decide if they were going to finalize the deal to buy us out. I have never seen a more imposing presence in my life. It was like Darth Vader entered the room. Just before the sale finalized, I got a job opportunity doing IT for another company and took it. Two weeks later "Black Monday" happened where the building was locked up and half the company was laid off with no warning. Soon after that they rebranded the US branch of the company Atari, to capitalize on the name recognition.

Fast forward a little over a decade and I was working at Flying Lab Software doing software testing for the MMO "Pirates of the Burning Sea". Best job in tech I ever had. Great company, fantastic team, and amazing players. At that point we were on our last legs though and needed money to keep going. Atari approached us to make a new RCT game. We did some design work ups that they said they liked, and offered a (from what I was told) horrible contract. We counter-offered and they took weeks to reply with their counter-counter offer. We responded with our changes and we didn't hear from them for a month, the entire time telling us that it looked ok and that they were waiting on a higher up to sign off on it. Meanwhile we were out of money and lay-offs started happening. Two weeks later we get the response of "Nah, we're done" and then very soon after the shtty DS game came out. We had to close down forever.

Come to find out later, that due to how the original purchase of GT Interactive went down, they didn't actually own RTC, and they had to come out with a game to retain the rights they had bought. They were playing us waiting to see if they could get a better deal with a different company. It would not surprise me if this new game isn't just a quick play for cash, but a way to retain the rights for the game due to the deal they made on the initial purchase (Think of Fox making crappy Fantastic Four movies, specifically because of the way the deal for the rights to the characters were made when Marvel initially sold them ages ago).

So, yea. Fuck "Atari".

Also, if they hadn't screwed us over like that FLS, you would have gotten a 1940's pulp MMO using the the Cryptic engine. From what we had done and were testing, it was going to be a fucking amazing game. Again, Fuck "Atari".

And yes, I am still bitter.