Atari was started by stoners who thought that making a video ping-pong game would be a great idea, and to their credit they were spot on. So much so that Warner Communications offered them a dump truck full of money for the company, which they gleefully accepted.
Warner had no idea what to do with it, which imo played a significant role in the disaster that was ET for the Atari VCS/2600 and led to the Great North American Video Game Crash of 1983.
Jack Tramiel
, who bought Atari for a song as a revenge-fuck after he was shoah'ed out of Commodore, got Atari back into the black through the same methods he successfully applied at Commodore viz. relentless cost-cutting and milking every last drop out of every product they made (case in point: the Atari 7800, which is little more than the OG 1977 Atari VCS with botox and a boob job, limped on until 1993 or so). With relatively little money going into R&D, the later Tramiel-era stuff suffered from this short-term thinking, leading to undercooked products being rushed to market, such as the Falcon 030 and the Jaguar. That being said, the Tramiel era was probably Atari's second golden age after the initial pre-Warner era.
Since then, the Atari brand has been diluted more and more as it changed hands from owner to owner. Some of the more egregious examples of this brand dilution being the Atari
shitcoin and the proposed
Atari Hotel in Las Vegas.
The only positive I can see is that at least Atari's trajectory since the mid '90s has been less of a shitshow than that of Commodore and Amiga.
