Atari full name is "Atari Inc."
-> Ataris Videogame division (including Home Computers) was sold to to "Jack Tramiel" (in 1984 - yes the previous owner of Commodore) which was named Atari Corporation or Atari Corp.
-> Ataris Arcade division was sold to Namco (1985) which was named Atari Games. End of 1990s Warner bought them back was integrated into Midway. For some time they used the Name "Atari Games" but as a company was integrated into Midway. Midway as a company also ceased to exists and is part of Warner Bros Games by now.
--> Atari Games video game subsidiary was Tengen
-> Technically there was a Telecommunications division which was sold to an electronic company. But for the focus of this page irrelevant.
-> Atari Inc was renamed after all that to Atari Holding but never produced anything, was afaik only to hold rights and maybe some estates. It was integrated into parent company Warner in Mid 90s without producing anything as far as I know. For the purpose of this side Atari Inc died in 1985.
-> Atarisoft is a Label of Atari Inc up to 1984 to release Atari catalogue for different systems like Intellivision, C64, PC and so on. The label died with Jack Tramiel takeover of the video game division, which did not release games for other systems up until IBM PC release of Tempest 2000.
-> Atari Interactive is complicated. It is the current company promoting Atari. It sees itself as descendant of Atari Inc. For that a understanding of history in Atari Corp is required. Atari Corp was sold to/merged with a disk drive manufacturer JTS. Thus Atari Corp as a company ceased to exist. After bankruptcy of JTS all remains including the right of the name Atari was bought by Hasbro. Hasbro sold the video game division Hasbro Interactive (including rights to Atari) later to Infogrames. Infogrames renamed itself to Atari SA and created/renamed its USA division to Atari Interactive. After the bankruptcy of Atari/Infogrames - Atari Interactive was one of the few bits of the company that survived. After sold out most of the more modern franchise games the company still exists. In short no there are a different companies just with the rights on the logo and name of Atari.
The issue seems to be that there are multiple Atari companies that are
legally distinct over the course of history.
1. Syzygy ->
Atari Inc -> Atari Games -> Atari Holdings
2.
Atari Corporation -> JTS -> Hasbro Interactive -> Infogrames Interactive -> Atari Interactive
3. GT Interactive -> Infogrames ->
Atari Inc
Now, we don't add the legal type to companies, be it things like Inc, LLC, etc.
Atari Inc has been merged with Atari.
Even if we did decide to start using the legal types, I can't think of a good way to differentiate between the two different Atari Inc.
Then there is the situation where the existing entries in the database that
should have Atari Corporation may have just Atari instead, and the large amount of entries that are probably going to have Atari set instead of Atari Interactive or Atari Games.
So what I am recommending next is that we merge down Atari Corporation into Atari as well, and add Atari Holdings (if you think there is a reason to add it) and keep Atari Interactive as is.
