‘Let’s be the best in the world at something’: Atari CEO Wade Rosen on how to restore pride to an iconic brand

There was a time, not too long ago, that I used to dread every Atari announcement.

Back in the early days, Atari was the biggest company in video games. It was the number one provider of home video game systems, and its logo became so iconic that it appeared in Blade Runner, the 1982 movie predicting that it would be one of the most powerful companies by the time the futuristic year 2019 rolled around.

Instead, by the time the actual 2019 arrived Atari had become the complete opposite, a flailing company running on fumes following decades of being sold, renamed and divided into so many subsidiaries and new ventures that anyone trying to write a concise history of the brand would quickly see how comically convoluted it was (speaking from experience).

The year 2020 opened with Atari announcing a deal to build eight futuristic hotels around the US with virtual reality and augmented reality tech. It was nonsensical, as was its deal later that year with the ICICB Group, a Dubai-based holding company that had been given a license to run an Atari-branded cryptocurrency online casino using an Atari Token currency.

In March 2021 Atari released the VCS, its first new console in 28 years. My review for VGC was a confused one, praising the slick design of the hardware but wondering who it was actually aimed at. “The Atari brand is back, but not necessarily with a bang yet,” I wrote at the time.

What a difference a few years can make, however. Just one month after that VCS review was published, Atari announced that chairman of the board Wade Rosen was to become the company’s new CEO, and that it was creating a new dedicated gaming division that would be distanced from its blockchain efforts.

Later that year, it was announced that the now Rosen-led Atari was ditching its strategy of releasing free-to-play and mobile games, with the new CEO saying that “premium gaming is better representative of the Atari DNA”. After cutting all ties with the ICICB Group in 2022, Atari’s blockchain plans have now been all but ditched, and Atari has now positioned itself as a retro-focused company.

Nowhere has this been more clear than in Atari’s recent series of company and IP acquisitions. In the last two years Rosen’s company has bought out Digital Eclipse and Nightdive Studios, two of the best retro-focused studios around. It also bought the MobyGames and AtariAge websites, both large online databases of video game information, with Rosen saying the acquisition of the latter would “ensure this important resource gets the support it needs to continue to fulfill its mission for years to come”.

Meanwhile, it’s been buying up abandoned IPs all over the place, with the aim being to either re-release, remaster, remake or reboot them. Some of these have already started taking shape – in 2023 Atari acquired more than 100 games from the Accolade, MicroProse, GT Interactive and Infogrames catalogues. One of these was the Bubsy series, of which a brand new game called Bubsy 4D was revealed during Gamescom.

Other acquisitions have included the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, the Surgeon Simulator IP, Transport Tycoon, and the entire Intellivision brand and its game library. Just last week it also acquired five Ubisoft games – Cold Fear, I Am Alive, Child of Eden, Grow Home and Grow Up – with plans to re-release them and look into potentially doing more with the IPs.

It’s clear that the Atari of 2025 is in a much better shape than the Atari of 2020, then, and it’s similarly clear that Rosen’s leadership has provided the company with the focus it had been sorely lacking.

To discuss this turnaround, and where the company goes from here, I sat down with Rosen during Gamescom.

On a personal note, Atari is a brand that means a lot to me. The 2600 was the first console I ever played when I was something like 4 years old.

Oh, no way.

Yup, I started off playing Combat and Missile Command, and Pele’s Soccer – sorry, we call that Championship Soccer now, don’t we?

Championship Soccer, yeah.

To have seen the company take a big dip in recent years, and to now see it starting to turn things around again, there are people out there who this is really important to.

Well, I think we’ll have some more fun stuff coming. I’m obviously thrilled with everything. The team is just amazing. Nightdive, Digital Eclipse, our hardware team, our licensing team, they’re really all firing. The games team, and Bubsy, this isn’t the end of it, it’s a journey.

We’re all in it to win it. We’re here for the long haul. That’s why I came in here. This isn’t a quick flip for us. We really want to see as far as we can take it.

Based on some of the interviews you’ve given it seems you don’t like taking credit for this, but it does seem like there have been big changes since you joined. What’s changed in the strategy since you stepped in that’s led to this turnaround?

Thanks man. I mean, I think there’s two things. There’s the specific strategy which I can speak to, and then there’s the more indirect changes, which I’ll speak to in a second.

But the specific strategy – when I got here, Atari was doing a lot of things but they weren’t doing any of them particularly well, and as a result nobody really knew what Atari was. It was just this brand, a big brand with a lot of public knowledge, which publicly had a lot of goodwill still, but in the games industry it was probably not viewed in that same light.

And I think it had been coasting on that for a long time. And so we just stopped and said: “Okay, what do we want to do? We can’t do everything.” We were making mobile games that were trying to compete with Supercell and King. I mean, these guys are pros, there’s no way to do it. Every once in a while a Monopoly Go comes along and it shocks everybody, but that’s the exception that proves the rule, right?

So for us, we really stopped and said “okay, let’s be best in the world at something”, and the company had basically been living on nostalgia at that point through its licensing. And there’s nothing wrong with that, we try hard to make sure that our diehard fans know that we care.

But what if you looked at that and you said: “Okay, well, we could be great at retro. We could be the best retro company in the world.” What does that even mean? Does it mean we just have to like shove things in a box and call it over? Let’s do things that are really innovative in retro. Let’s push the technical boundaries.

“But what if you looked at that and you said: ‘Okay, well, we could be great at retro. We could be the best retro company in the world.’ What does that even mean? Does it mean we just have to like shove things in a box and call it over? Let’s do things that are really innovative in retro. Let’s push the technical boundaries.”

Let’s make these collections an interactive documentary, like Digital Eclipse. Let’s make these games so much fun to play that even if you never played the original Turoks they’re still a blast to go back to. Nightdive always likes to say “it plays how you remember it, not how it actually was,” I think that’s their big line.

And so in that we just started by carving out that retro niche and we really continue to try and do as well as we can, but we’ve even expanded what that means. Now we do a lot of original titles based on older series. That’s higher risk – some work, some don’t.

The recent announcement with Bubsy went really well, well beyond our expectations. We thought it would get some pretty good press but I forget how much people love Bubsy – like, genuinely love Bubsy, not even ironically. It was the number three most trending thing on Twitter for like six hours after it came out. I mean, not just in terms of Gamescom, but overall. It was second only to Lego Batman for all games revealed at Gamescom. I’m like, “Bubsy, really? Okay.”

Because in a sense it shouldn’t deserve to, but people have such great memories of it. Even though as a game, the original ones weren’t really that great.

Well, it’s infamous as well. So you have it on both sides. You have people who love it. You have people who don’t love it, but it’s infamous. And, you know, let’s hope any publicity is good publicity, right? Because I think that’s part of the charm.

And so yeah, we try to be great at everything we do. We try to do less, and be great at those things, and then even try to be the best in the world at any of those things. That’s really the focus.

It’s interesting, because when I see some of the games that Atari releases, there’s stuff that I’ll see and I think “surely they knew this wasn’t going to be a multi-million selling game”, but at the same time there must be a balancing act in keeping fans of niche games happy.

When you look at Nightdive’s stuff, they’ll do an Outlaws, or a PO’ed, but then you’ve got your id Software games and Dark Forces and bigger names like that, so I’m assuming the aim is to juggle stuff like that, where you release the ‘big’ one, then the more niche one to keep the retro enthusiasts happy?

It is, yeah. I mean, where you can, the end goal is always to try and do something that is both something we genuinely have a lot of passion about and has a lot of commercial viability.

I think a good example of that would be Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, right? People have joined and applied to be a part of Digital Eclipse to work on that series. That is not something that we reluctantly took on, people are so excited about that. And yeah, we think that’s going to have a really strong commercial viability to it.

And then you have other things that are like cult classics – Outlaws, I think, is a great example. I do remain a little cautiously optimistic on that one because even though it wasn’t a game I had played growing up, the response was really positive and people who played it love it, but it’s probably a little bit more passion than like raw numbers-driven decision making on that one, I would say.

The goal is when you can get them both. But at the very least, I think that’s a part of the give and take in any business. If you go too far in any one direction – if you’re only numbers-driven, it crushes the spirit of the company. If you’re only passion-driven, well, you oftentimes don’t have a company.

We’re seeing a lot of both of those in the industry right now, and so we try to straddle the line. But we definitely let the team pick a… you know, we all work together and choose jointly what we’re going to work on, but there will definitely be a few like Outlaws that the team kind of throws out and I’m like “yeah, let’s give it a swing”.

It’s like when you get the Hollywood actors who do the big blockbuster ones to pay the bills, then do a couple of indie arthouse ones for themselves?

[Laughs] Yeah, exactly. Life’s too short, you know? I’ve got mine too, right? If we ever had a chance to work on Panzer Dragoon Saga or Ogre Battle or Snatcher or something like that…

Oh, Snatcher is my dream.

Right? I mean, I don’t know if it would do well, but I’d probably push it through and make sure we did it just because I would love to work on one of those.

But it all has to be in a balance. If this company just became like “what games does Wade want to work on?” we would not be around too long.

So then is the strategy that newcomers flock to the more well-known titles like Mortal Kombat or Tetris Forever, and the hope is they’ll then say “Digital Eclipse, these guys don’t just do retro compilations, they make me give a shit about even the lesser titles in these series”, and then they’ll go take a look at something like Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter story, meaning those other titles have a longer tail?

For sure. Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of things on that. The first one, exactly what you said, the developer’s catalog itself, right? If you look at Mortal Kombat, you know, Atari’s on splash screen and stuff but what is very front and forward there is Mortal Kombat and Digital Eclipse. We really push the developers, same with Nightdive.

This is not one of those things where we’re trying to… people love those devs. And so, that love, when somebody cares that much about the developer, it does become a little bit more of… hey, I mean, how many people would have ever checked out PO’ed?

If another team would have remastered that, would anyone have played PO’ed? Probably not, right? But because Nightdive did it, people were like “maybe I will check that out”.

We know you’ve been hungry for the return of another 90s classic, so we cooked up something extra special that should help satisfy your appetite…

🍳 PO’ed: Definitive Edition 🍳

It’s just like you remember it, but ✨ ENHANCED✨ pic.twitter.com/gVudz9w7QK

— Nightdive Studios (@NightdiveStudio) April 1, 2024

I hope the same thing happens with Outlaws too. You’ll get your dedicated fans – certainly more than PO’ed, because Outlaws is a much better game – that will pick that up, but there will be a lot of people who will pick it up because of it being Nightdive. It’s the exact same with Digital Eclipse.

And then the secondary effect of that is something like Atari 50, where some people bought it because it was Atari, some people bought it because it was Digital Eclipse. But we got a lot of people, a lot of younger gamers who bought it because it just reviewed, I think it’s got an 89 or something on Metacritic.

And it was one of the top 10 games of the year, and it reviewed amazingly well, and they said “alright, well, I’ll check this out”. And now they’re buying Atari 2600+ consoles, now they’re out buying carts in game stores, and they weren’t even born 15 years after they stopped production of this thing.

And that secondary effect there, that’s the ultimate dream, where you’re making fans out of both the game company but also the series, and then that expands their involvement in those series overall.

Atari 50 felt to me like a turning point, because there were countless Atari compilations in the past…

Oh, countless.

But with every one of them you would start it up and it would go “here’s 50 games”, and you’d just go “okay”. And for people my age, I get it. But for younger generations, these are basically cave paintings without context, and it’s the context in Atari 50 that provides the gateway.

Would you be open to me telling you a little story about Atari 50?

Sure.

Because it was, I think, not the first, probably the second game I greenlit when becoming CEO. And that was a conversation between me and Mike Mika, studio head of Digital Eclipse. Great guy. One of my favorite humans.

So I had that same thought as you, we had done these collections to death. But we had a 50th anniversary, so what were we going to do for the 50th anniversary? We got some pitches, none of them quite felt right.

I was like: “Listen, there’s something here. I mean, this is a big anniversary we’re coming up on, it’s the first one in the games industry.” Certainly in terms of companies that started just in games – you know, Nintendo has been around forever, but not as a games company.

And so I talked to a number of people and what the team and I agreed upon was “we have to make something that’s better than free”. Because if it’s just shoving the games in the box, emulation is not hard. I think all Atari games combined in total, total up to like 70 MB.

It’s not, you know… well, actually some emulation is really tricky with Atari, like 30fps with a 60… but the point is, you can access these things. That doesn’t make it genuinely appealing. But, you know, there’s something here.

So I met Mike and he’s like: “Hey, can I pitch you an idea I’ve got? We would love to do this interactive history of Atari from beginning to end. You know, start with the beginning of Atari, look at its origins, you can watch videos with new developers.”

And I’m hearing this, going “wow, yeah, let’s do this, this is perfect”, and I think he almost didn’t hear me, because he kept pitching it. He was like “and then we’ll do this”, because he was so used to people saying no to him on this idea.

We were not the first company. I know he had pitched to almost every major game company that had a big back catalog. And they’ve done collections for people for years, right? And they’d always kind of snuck in videos or things like that. But they’d never done the timeline on a big catalog before.

So when we said yes, I think it kind of took him aback. He was like: “…Oh. Alright, alright, let’s do this, let’s go.”

So it was really Mike’s idea, I said yes immediately the first time hearing it because I just asked myself “what would I want?” and that’s what I wanted. I wanted the context, I wanted to understand it.

The games themselves are not really that interesting these days without the context. But as soon as you have context and you know where it is, they become vastly more enjoyable to play, because you see how each one’s building on each other, how each one fits into this larger narrative.

I mean, they crushed it. I couldn’t have been happier. And it’s been a real joy to have them – them and Nightdive – to have them as part of the team and be able to work with them.

So the release of Atari 50 led to the Gold Master Series…

Well, I think technically they were working on The Making of Karateka, but they hadn’t found anybody to bite on the timeline feature, so they kind of put it to the side and finished Atari 50 and then went back.

But you know, I think their initial hope was to do something maybe like 50, but Karateka was where they were going to prove out the timeline, and then we said “yes” unexpectedly.

Well now the Gold Master Series is up and running, and it’s one of the main reasons we gave Digital Eclipse Studio of the Year in our awards last year. In terms of the Gold Master Series, are there numerous new entries already signed up, and ready to be started on in the future? Or are you just taking them one at a time?

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s one at a time. We’ve obviously got a list. The challenge, if I’m being completely candid, is they are doing a really good job. It takes a lot… because there’s the editorial and the game component, right?

We have multiple teams working in parallel – the editorial team, the games team, the emulation team, the hardware team – so it’s tough to do more than one at once, it’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck type thing.

Further reading

VGC’s Developer of the Year 2024 is Digital Eclipse

This year the Atari-owned retro studio enjoyed its best run of form

But we’ve got a list. You know, like you were describing, there’s some that we do that have really large reach, there’s some that have maybe a little bit smaller reach, but are deeply passionate for many, many people, and we try and balance all of that. But, yeah, there’s a list, and it’s pretty cool.

One thing I would say that I would love to see – and this is not to say that this is the next Gold Master series or anything like that – a feature in Mortal Kombat is basically you can pick any character, and you can follow their progression through each of the games, so you can see their storyline progression.

And I oftentimes think “man, I would love to have that in an RPG setting”. You know, I play Ys, and it’s like “well, which one is this? Where is this in the timeline”? Because, you know, they bounce all over, they’re not chronological. You’re trying to remember what happened in the previous ones and everything. Something like that would be a lot of fun, and I think it could be reused in a lot of different game series.

But Gold Master Series is alive and well, and there’s going to be some fun ones. You got any suggestions? Any that you’d love to see?

It’s weird because I’ve thought about that before and my brain starts coming up with licensed stuff which would make it so difficult. When I saw the Mortal Kombat reveal, I thought “fantastic” and my brain instantly went “NBA Jam next”, then I realised it would be a logistical nightmare. Growing up I liked a lot of licensed stuff…

Right, like the Ocean stuff.

Exactly. So, in an ideal world I would love a history of WWE games, but even then, most of them weren’t good and that’s before you look at the logistics of wrestlers who are dead, wrestlers who have committed crimes since then…

[Laughs]

In terms of Atari 50 though, you say titles like that bring in newcomers to the Atari brand. But it does still seem like you’ll see younger people still wearing the Atari ‘Fuji’ logo t-shirts, but to them it’s just another logo, the equivalent of wearing a shirt with NASA or Coke on it.

Like a Nirvana shirt.

Yeah, exactly.

My daughter wears a Nirvana sweatshirt. I don’t think she knows. I put on Nirvana for her. She was like “what is this?” and I’m like “this is the shirt you’re wearing, this is your sweatshirt”.

She looked at me and she was like “I don’t know if I like this”, and I’m like “yeah, I didn’t think so”.

So then she instantly put an Atari shirt on.

[Laughs] Yeah! So there definitely are some components to that, for sure.

But I mean, are you okay with that? Or would you like there to be more actual brand engagement?

Listen, I’ll take whatever I can get on that. Like, people outside advertising our brand for free, great, I’ll never say no.

The challenge for making original work at Atari is it’s not quite like, you know, Sega. Sega’s bringing back some of their classics. Amazing. I’m really looking forward to Jet Set Radio. But that conceptually is the same game, it’s updated but you’re not conceptually changing it.

But what is [1980 game] Adventure today? You know, we take swings – Adventure of Samsara is a really good game, it’s got this esoteric bizarreness that the original Adventure has, mixed with Prince of Persia and Shadow of the Colossus.

But you’re still having to get pretty far from what you did, because the original is – everything built on that, first of all, so to make a sequel that’s just like the original is really to make nothing, because everything kind of was built on the shoulders of that.

And the second thing is, anything you do is naturally going to be more abstract from it. So it’s tough to make games that are original enough to attract new gamers and still get the old gamers. And we try. We try and we’re making – like, I think Adventure of Samsara is a really good game.

Probably the closest we’ve come, so far I think, is Bubsy, which we just announced. That has a lot of the spirit of the old game. I mean, we even captured some of the spirit of Bubsy 3D by having a lot of verticality elements to it. Not that we’re trying to borrow too much from Bubsy 3D, but that one probably is the best example of going back to that original or doing something original but still having to tap into that work.

But, you know, we’ll keep trying, and I think that’s the other way to get them in. But ultimately, if they’re wearing the shirts, my view is, when they see us out in the wild and they see us on a download screen or in a store – I mean, I doubt they’ll ever buy a game out of a store, but who knows? Or maybe they see the 2600+ in a store, that’s more realistic.

If they’re like “oh, Atari, alright”, and make an impromptu purchase there, I would feel good about that, right?

Speaking of which, is it harder to bridge that gap with hardware? With games it’s easier to imagine someone take a punt on, say, like Yars Rising (which I really liked) then go investigate its past and discover Yar’s Revenge. But something like the Atari 2600+ or even the VCS, wouldn’t you consider that a harder sell because it’s more of a niche product for older players first and foremost?

I mean, the VCS is kind of its own animal, but the 2600+, we thought it would be more niche than it is. It’s definitely outperformed what we thought.

We were trying to answer a question that I had been getting since day one as CEO, which was “I’ve got a bunch of Atari carts sitting in a box somewhere in my house, how do I play these things?”

And before it would be like “oh, well, go find a 2600 at some pawn shop. Get an RF converter, but you’re going to probably need a Retrotink to make sure your digital…” and immediately their eyes glaze over, they don’t want to hear anything you say.

So we were like, listen, I know we’ve got plug-and-plays. Those have been around forever. But people want to plug in their cartridges. People want the physicality of that. Let’s open back up this ecosystem that we’ve been treating like a legacy ecosystem and actually breathe some life into it. And release new games.

“I know we’ve got plug-and-plays. Those have been around forever. But people want to plug in their cartridges. People want the physicality of that. Let’s open back up this ecosystem that we’ve been treating like a legacy ecosystem and actually breathe some life into it. And release new games.”

And to our surprise, we thought it would be a much smaller market than it was. But a lot of people have gotten into that. Also, to our surprise, a lot of younger gamers.

Now, maybe if you’re a mobile gamer and you mostly play Roblox, yeah, you probably haven’t dipped your toe into the 2600+. But for younger gamers who played Atari 50, I think they have kind of made that move.

Just, like, I didn’t grow up with many of the European computers here. But being the retro gamer that I am, one way or another, I’ve ended up playing a fair amount of Sinclair or Atari 8-bit or Commodore 64 games over the years, because I want to really understand what was there and came before me.

I was speaking to Larry Kuperman at Nightdive earlier, and chatting to him about Outlaws. He was talking about how “Atari is where we belong” and “it feels like a family” and things like that. I had a similar chat with Chris Kohler from Digital Eclipse last year. Now, you’re always going to get people saying “this isn’t the original Atari, this isn’t the Atari I know…”

[Laughs] What an insane thing to say. I never understand that. I’m like, wait, so what about Jack Tramiel? That wasn’t the original Atari either, he bought that from Warner Communications, was Warner the original Atari?

But at the same time, when I speak to guys like Larry and Chris – when you watch the interview clips with former staff on Atari 50 and they talk about the family atmosphere – it feels like there’s something like that growing here, and that maybe in that sense it’s becoming something that could be considered similar to the original Atari, at least in spirit?

I mean, certainly the ethos of collaboration, creativity, you know, trying to push the envelopes on specific things.

I mean, that was a different time, right? That was a time when a single company could capture 80% of this industry. That will never happen to me. I mean, even Steam doesn’t have that. It never will. But those aspects of creation and collaboration, and taking risks and doing it a smart way, I think we really embody those.

The one thing I will say is, I try never to call it a family because ultimately, I really think of it as a team. That’s a slight distinction, but I think with family, it’s hard to hold each other accountable, right? I tolerate a lot of things with my family that I probably would never tolerate with other people in my life.

But I think that what we all have in common too is a shared set of core values. And companies talk about their core values all the time, and I don’t know if they mean it or not. We mean it. We live and die by those core values.

“That was a time when a single company could capture 80% of this industry. That will never happen to me. I mean, even Steam doesn’t have that. It never will. But those aspects of creation and collaboration, and taking risks and doing it a smart way, I think we really embody those.”

And that’s the first thing when, in any acquisition or anything, we come in and we’re like: “Hey guys, this is it. If these don’t mesh with you, we completely understand, let’s find a way to part on good terms.” And that’s before an acquisition would ever happen. We don’t force anybody to be a part of that, but everybody who is, buys into those. And I think having that shared set of beliefs and operating principles, that is the other key to all this.

It’s not just the retro. It’s finding something you can be the best in the world at. But it’s also having this layer of shared values that you build on. And I don’t know that everybody believes like that. That sounds kind of trite, but I don’t think it is.

Because I’ve noticed in this industry there’s this belief that you can acquire a lot of companies and let them all run autonomously and be their own thing. And it’s like, well, then what’s the point? What are we doing?

We don’t want to force anyone to be a part of what we’re building, but if you’re going to be a part of it, “here’s what we believe and here’s how we’re going to do it”, and I think by finding like-minded people, that’s why it feels that way. It’s just a highly performing and operating team, and in that comes something even better than family, which is mutual respect. And that is what I feel for everybody here.

I’m so grateful I get to wake up and work with everybody. I’m not always grateful I have to interact with my family, right? But I’m really grateful that I get to be a part of this team. It has been the highlight of my professional career in my life.