A Game Development Blog

Phil Harrison on the Power of the Atari Brand

In Part 2 of our interview with Phil, he discusses the importance of the Atari brand, the next steps in Atari’s transformation, and the state of the games industry as a whole.

GameDaily BIZ: Will Infogrames finally adopt Atari as the global brand? Isn’t that a brand that’s more universally recognized?

Phil Harrison: We’ve not really hidden this, but we always talk about the consumer-facing part of the company being Atari and the corporate part of the business being Infogrames. That’s just for historical reasons. We may change that some day but that would involve changing stock market listings and various other technical things, which are a little bit more complex to do. Everything we do that’s relevant for the game player we use Atari and when we’re talking to the financial and investment community, then it’s Infogrames. I’m the first to admit it’s confusing.

BIZ: When you joined Atari you talked about the strength of the Atari name, and while it resonates with the 30 and over crowd, today’s kids probably don’t care. How do you connect with the youth?

PH: For some people, Atari means the early age of coin-operated games and the early days of console games and the early computer hardware like the 400, 800 and others, which were among the first computers used to create music. More recently, it means more traditional kinds of video games. And to a certain number of consumers, it means t-shirts they wear to music festivals. If you look at that spread, we have a venerable, historical brand and we have a cool contemporary consumer brand that has credibility in fashion and music and technology. It’s a broadly applicable brand. It’s now our responsibility to build the products and services that do justice to it.

BIZ: How will you do justice to the Atari brand?

PH: The way we’ve been rebuilding and repositioning the company is to re-ignite the publishing business. We have Chronicles of Riddick and Ghostbusters, which are examples of high quality products that will be enjoyed by gamers around the world. These are high quality games that will deliver a fun and engaging experience. That’s step one of our process.

BIZ: And the next step?

PH: Step two is the games and the services that we’ll be building ourselves. Those will take a little bit longer to bring to market. Some of the excellent developer relationships we’re forming with studios comes from our new team. We hired Paulina Bozeck to be development director of our newly formed studio in London. She comes to us from Sony where she oversaw the SingStar product line.

BIZ: And how is Atari reaching out to game creators?

PH: We’ve just announced a strategic partnership with Q Entertainment, which is one of Japan’s leading creative game entertainment companies. Tetsuya Mizuguchi is one of the world’s most respected game designers. He’ll be working with us on a new game called QJ (working title).

BIZ: What kind of game will that be?

PH: If you think about QJ as a new incarnation of DJ, it’ll give you an idea. It’s taking the genres of music, performance and games and blending it together into a new experience. Mizuguchi-son is known for connecting people through music and rhythm with games like Rez. He’s a pioneer in that field.

BIZ: How will Atari divvy up development resources between casual and hardcore gamers?

PH: It’s a very delicate balance to get right because you have to match your development expense to the audience size and the platform and the price consumers will pay and the number of consumer who will buy. That’s what being a software publisher is all about – getting those various moving parts aligned so that you can have a successful game.

BIZ: Will you look at your upcoming slate and say that half of your games will be aimed at the mainstream casual gamer and the rest will be focused on more hardcore gamers?

PH: It’s not really that scientific. It’s really driven by opportunity. If we see a great game that we think can be successful in making great quality and bringing a cool game to the right audience then we’ll do it. It’s not like saying here’s the master plan and we have five slots – three of them are going to be casual and two of them are going to be hardcore. Each game we do has to make creative sense and economic sense.

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