Someone Else Owns Atari (3/16/98)
JTS Industries, a hard-drive maker who bought the shattered remains of Atari a couple years back, has sold the charred bits that remain to Hasbro. The deal gives them rights to Atari hardware such as the Lynx handheld failure and the Jaguar 64-bit home console failure, as well as the name rights to such classic games as "Centipede", "Asteroids", and "Missile Command".Apparently, according to various gaming industry pundits, Hasbro Interactive plans to do the same with these titles as they did last year with "Frogger". That is to say, update them for the 90's, releasing 3D polygon-based versions of them for PC and Sony Playstation that everyone will hate and nobody will buy.
On a related note, Psygnosis will apparently begin producing games that run on DVD players. The first, "Lander", will be an update of the classic C-64 game "Thrust". No, it's not dirty. And really, there's no joke here. It's just cool, is all. Thrust was a great game. And they're working on a Playstation version, too.
