September 12, 2023 at 8:39 a.m. by Valentin Sattler – After it was already heard in the rumor mill, Atari has now taken over the community website Atari Age. This will apparently strengthen the focus on retro games and homebrew developments in the future.
After the unsuccessful attempts to make money with blockchain and NFT experiments, the French company Atari apparently wants to continue to concentrate on its own retro consoles and games in the future. In keeping with this, the takeover of Atari Age was recently announced. This is a website that has existed since 1998 and offers, among other things, homebrew games for old Atari consoles such as the Atari Lynx, the Atari 2600 or the Atari 5200.
Changes and improvements
According to a statement from Albert Yarusso, the website operator, the sale of Atari Age was not easy for him. In view of the supposedly positive development at Atari, which is clearly aimed at retro fans again with the Atari 2600+, he still agreed to the sale. In the future, he will continue to look after the site – as a full-time employee of Atari.
The deal is not expected to result in any direct changes for Atari Age for the time being, but will result in significant improvements in the future. For example, Yarusso wants to better maintain the website’s game database in the near future, and homebrew development by the community is also apparently to be strengthened. For example, Atari apparently wants to offer some developers the opportunity to bring their creations onto the market.
Equally exciting: Atari 2600: 1,000 euro collector’s edition with ten original games already sold out
Even if there are no changes in the future as a result of the takeover, some adjustments have been implemented in the past. For example, some homebrew games that were based on third-party licenses and were therefore legally problematic were removed from the website. If Atari actually focuses more on its own retro legacy with the takeover and strengthens the community’s own developments, this one-time loss should probably be bearable.
Those: via Ars Technica
