Atari's US Subsidiary Files for Chapter 11, Hopes to Break Free from Atari SA

Hot on the heels (in the worst possible way) of THQ filing for bankruptcy last month comes Atari's US-based headquarters doing the same. It's the company's goal to break free from its France-based overlord Atari, SA and then get bought out to reform as a private company and subsequently continue business under a new name.

Atari, Inc. didn't begin its life as Atari, but rather GT Interactive. It was then named Infogrames, Inc. in 1999 thanks to a company stake increase, and finally, was renamed to Atari, Inc. in 2003 once Infogrames was able to acquire the rights to use the Atari name. While you're going to be seeing the name "Pong" thrown around a lot when reading about this bankruptcy, Atari, Inc. had absolutely nothing to do with Atari until 2001.

Test Drive Unlimited 2 (2011)

In recent years, Atari, Inc. has been responsible for publishing games such as Test Drive Unlimited 2, Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Time, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena and Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale.

As an avid fan of one of these games, Test Drive Unlimited 2, I began to wonder a couple of months ago if something like this was bound to happen. On September 24th, 2012, the company posted to the game's Facebook page that the official forums were being taken down, set to relaunch with a new version. On October 4th, the company followed-up by saying, "It is taking us longer than we originally thought to relaunch the forums." As it stands today, that relaunching still hasn't happened. This problem, as I've since discovered, goes beyond TDU2. The company's entire forum system is down.

Alone in the Dark (2008)

What this means for the future of either the US-based developer or the parent company is going to take a while to figure out, but if anything, hopefully it doesn't mean that any of Atari's franchises will suddenly go down the drain.