Oh, What a Tangled Web Atari Weaves

And now, a low-poly, AI-generated drawing of Atari
founder Nolan Bushnell, because I paid thirty frickin'
bucks for a month of Midjourney, and I might as
well have something to show for it.

We interrupt this extended hiatus for this important message! Thanks to SlickDeals user Simoleon, we now know the full list of games that will be included in Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, set to be released on November 11th. I regret to say that if you were looking forward to the Jaguar and Lynx games in this collection, you will probably be a little disappointed. You're getting just nine of the former and a measly six of the latter, with the high points of the Lynx's library being ignored in favor of Basketbrawl, Malibu Mammaries Bikini Volleyball, Scrapyard Dog, Super Asteroids & Missile Command, Turbo Sub, and Warbirds. 

"Why no Gauntlet or STUN Runner or RoadBlasters?," my readers would exclaim, if I had any of those. Well, here's the problem. Those were all by Atari Games, the half of Atari that was split off from Atari's home division after the video game crash of 1983. That company would start its own home division, Tengen, and punch out games for the NES and Genesis until eventually getting consumed by Time-Warner Interactive (yes, the company that used to own Atari in a past life) and ultimately being swallowed whole by Midway, which would also get gobbled up by Warner Brothers.

Confused yet? Wait, there's more. The Atari that's releasing this collection was first owned by Warner, then former Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel, then hard drive maker JTS, then toy giant Hasbro (oh man was this ever a bad period in the company's life), and finally French company Infogrames, which would eventually adopt the name because Infogrames sounds like a breakfast cereal for nerds, rather than a proper video game company.

Epyx gave us some pretty sweet
game covers. Also, they invented
the concept of the procedurally
generated dungeon crawler.
Yeah, all those Rogue-likes and
Rogue-lites you've sank hours of
fruitless gameplay into started
right here. You can blame Epyx
for all that wasted time.
(image from Wikipedia)

So that in not so short is why you're not getting the better games for the Atari Lynx. What's really peculiar is that the launch titles for the system, created by Epyx, are nowhere to be found either. You'd think that the current Atari would have purchased the likes of Blue Lightning and Electro-Cop along with the Lynx, but evidently those games are still the property of whoever owns Epyx at the moment. Google says that's Bridgestone Multimedia Group Global, but whoever these guys are, it seems they weren't willing to play ball with whatever we're calling Atari these days.

Things are a little more encouraging on the Jaguar side of the fence, with Tempest 2000, Cybermorph, and Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy all being included, but you're not getting the goofy Mortal Kombat clones Kasumi Ninja and Ultra Vortek, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Alien vs. Predator won't be included either. Hey, you try to negotiate with 20th Century Fox's corporate parent Disney for the rights to these classic horror movie icons and see how well that works out for you. You'd probably have more luck wrestling with a face hugger.