Atari Reiterates Retro Focus, Not Competing With Nintendo

After years of meandering messages and bankruptcies, Atari SA appears to be turning a corner with a retro focus.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, CEO Wade Rosen reiterated the company’s commitment to retro, following the 2022 release of the magnificent Atari 50 compilation and the recent release of the emulation-based Atari 2600+ (more on that from Time Extension).

Rosen says Atari focuses on retro rather than competing with Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo. Exactly what Rosen said:

“As an organization when I came on board, the question was, ‘What can we do better than anyone else in the world?’ And we’re not in a state to really compete with Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo, nor do we want to. So when we looked and asked what we could do better than anyone, retro was the thing that jumped out to us, at least at this stage in our history. So we just decided to be as great as we could at this very specific thing and that’s what we’ve been focused on.”

This will likely relieve Atari fans worried about its future in 2023.

Rosen discusses Atari’s acquisitions of Digital Eclipse and Nightdive Studios in detail. He says the pair won’t have to make Atari-related products and may collaborate.

“I think both [Digital Eclipse and Nightdive] share the same DNA with Atari of focusing on a niche and trying to be really good at something rather than trying to be OK at a lot of different things. That made it easy. And the fact that niche was in the same space we really want to be good at – these two are arguably two of the best retro companies in the world – it made a lot of sense to bring those together.”

We’re eager to see what Atari releases in the coming months and years.