Gardner: ‘We’re rebooting Atari’

News

Neil Long Feb 15 2008, 10:19am

New Infogrames CEO to take Atari from being a top 20 “packaged goods brand” to a top five online player

One killer title per quarter, a revolutionary online portal, more open dialogue with Atari’s US operation and a ramping up of its distribution business were just some of the targets Gardner outlined in an exclusive interview with MCV earlier this week.

But first and foremost, Gardner plans to push the Atari brand online and grab a number of web-based opportunities with both hands.

“We’re rebooting Atari. My vision is to bring the coin-op arcade back home through the web. To me that’s not just re-hashing the old games but it’s re-interpreting them for audiences today,” he confidently told MCV.

“We’re going to go from being a top 20 packaged goods player to a top five online player. We’re going to use our speed, our powerful brand and our ability to work with the best talent in Europe.

It’s going to be transformational.”

And with recent financial worries effectively lifted thanks to major additional investment from majority shareholder BlueBay, Gardner is confident that Atari has the cash and the resources to follow through.

“We have got good working capital to invest – close to a hundred million Euros – and we have got a committed group of people here who have proven themselves as fantastic fighters,” added Gardner.

“They really know how to stay alive and work in the video games business. We’re going to take the games business to the internet, where what we have traditionally seen in this area is internet people taking their business to games.”