Atari Reborn

The troubles of Infogrames and the Atari business have been well documented. Executives and board members have quit the publisher or worse — been pushed. The company has posted multi-million dollar losses quarter after quarter. And intellectual property and development studios were sold off to bidders keen to take advantage of an outfit haemorrhaging cash and credibility. And yet despite the struggles, the Atari brand still means something to a lot of people in the industry.

It certainly still means something to former Electronic Arts veteran David Gardner, who joined parent company Infogrames at the end of January. While many had given up on the outfit, Gardner has been attracted by the iconic brand and is keen to reinvent the Atari name and its standing in the videogame business. With a new cash injection from partners BlueBay Asset Management, and with ex-Sony worldwide studios boss Phil Harrison joining the company only yesterday as president to take charge of future software, this is clearly a company not to be dismissed as a dying giant. It's time to take Atari seriously again.

GamesIndustry.biz caught up with David Gardner just before he hopped on a plane to New York to promote the latest Alone in the Dark title. Here, he discusses the challenges of turning the company around, reinventing the business for an online market, having faith in the value of an historic name and investing in the future.

I was actually attracted by the state the company is in, on a couple of different levels. The business has had a turbulent time but in fact over the last couple of months a lot of things have taken shape to really sort things out. One of the most important of these is that the company has cash — more cash than debt — so that it's actually able to operate the business. That was critical for me because I wanted to make sure we had a well-financed business so that we could get on to investing in the future. That's one of the things I'm going to change — make sure the kind of investments we make with that cash are really going to pay dividends in the future. And I love the brand. I'm CEO of Infogrames but everyone really refers to it as Atari — it's a legendary brand and that makes it incredibly attractive.

A big part of my diligence before going into this was the Atari name. I personally grew up with Atari as a lot of people in the industry have, I see it as a positive, and I actually believe that more now than before I joined. The number of calls and emails and Facebook messages that I've had from people saying they love Atari and they want to see it great again is encouraging.

The key to that of course is going to be making great products that add to the brand as opposed to drag it through the mud. To me it's a testament to how loved this brand is that people are willing to forgive it, it's a brand that people want to succeed. If you think about that versus some of the major brands that people love to hate, they may be well recognised but people don't cut them any slack.

The main thing is that we've got to make sure that we use our cash in the right way, we don't want to be wasting money on things that aren't strategic to the business. Another way to say that is we need to make sure we're as efficient as we can be. At the same time, we're also going to identify opportunities to invest in things that matter for the future.

For me, it's really about online. The business and the industry is moving online on a global basis. It's moving at different speeds in different countries, but it's pretty clear to me that the whole way that people are going to want to buy their games, play their games, interface with their games is network-centric. That's where we need to get a lot smarter, a lot quicker, and use this famous brand. We have a lot more cash than start-up companies do. So I view ourselves as a well-branded, well-financed start-up. That's the position we'd rather be in than a poorly funded, disappointed, broken down old company.

To be honest, to be successful you're going to have to have a mix of all of those things but clearly biased in one way or another to one of those aspects. People digitally download games and others want to buy and play games that they don't have to download. Personally, I'm in the category of not having to wait for downloads that take hours and hours. I think that frankly, it's quicker to go into GAME and buy a boxed copy off a shelf. For me, the future is in creating very high quality games that are using technology with games playing on a server. That also gives you really seamless multi-user experiences so you can create socially dynamic things that are really interesting.

Exactly, not worrying about configurations and all those performance issues. All that stuff should be seamless like a phone service — you pick up the phone and you get a dial tone and that's it. You should be able to go to the computer and get some game time.

It's going to be a blend, we have some of that going on in the company and clearly there are going to be some opportunities where we can still make money doing that. And that's really our filter — is it profitable?

That old fashioned business model you've just mentioned is really struggling to be profitable and it's certainly struggling on an aggregate basis. Now for a game to be profitable it's got to be a top twenty game, but there are only twenty of those. So with thousands of games in development we've got to have a very different cost model and a different economic model for charging for things. We've got to be at the forefront of redefining that. But it's exciting, that what I really want to do with the company. People complain about the price of games but there are other ways in which they can interface with games. Some things are going to be free to play with a microstransaction model, some may include advertising although I'm still a litte sceptical on that.

I haven't seen any consumer data that convinces me it's massively effective. And I also look to the East where the online business model gets the most exposure to consumers, being a whole industry. Advertising is not a big part of that — it's subscriptions, microtransactions. There is some advertising, so I don't want to completely throw that model under the bus, but it has a lot more challenges. It has to be relevant, it's just too easy to ignore and click through. Because when it's not that easy it's really annoying and I'm not sure customers want that. The customer decides — if you piss them off, they go away.

Whoops, yeah, I don't know quite what was going on there. I'm a pretty firm believer that the value of the company is built through the properties that it owns. The good news is that we have a massive catalogue of properties — over 500 well-recognised properties. We have the DNA of every major company through gaming history — the Ocean, GT Interactive, Gremlin, Accolade factory of products, it's a long genetic history. It's not going to be hard to bring well-known properties to market, it's going to be hard to make sure they are relevant and good in today's terms. We're not just going to re-release 1980s classics untouched — that would be a mistake.

Any good games company has to be constantly developing new intellectual properties but we just don't have the same stress about having to completely reinvent everything at the same time.

It should be a centre for great European gaming and creative talent. That doesn't neccesarily mean that they come and work on the payroll, but it means they like doing business with Atari and they feel like they get to experiment and experience their dreams with the products, and it's a really positive and creative association. That's critical in terms of bringing the product ideas and consumer fun through the brand.

We want to relaunch the brand so it makes sense, people understand what it is and it stands for the right historical values, and we're looking at doing that in an online way. We want people to think of Atari as the online leaders and they should get that impression from the products. Those are our main goals.

David Gardner is CEO of Infogrames. Interview by Matt Martin.