The company’s US operations will henceforth be known as Atari Inc., while we in Britain will now be dealing with Atari UK. All other regional divisions are also being renamed to fit the new branding, and the division responsible for the Hasbro board game licenses will be known as Atari Interactive.
Only Infogrames SA will retain its name, at least for now – it’s not clear whether this is a deliberate decision on the part of the company, or simply down to some requirement of French corporate law.
The Nasdaq ticker symbol for the company will be changing as well – with the old IFGM symbol being retired and replaced with ATAR. The symbol on the Paris CAC 40 listing will remain as 5257.
Commercially, this decision is almost certainly the right one for Infogrames; its own brand has been badly soiled by a series of poor business decisions and even poorer software releases over the past few years, while the Atari brand remains a very strong and indeed emotive one in the games marketplace. It’s also worth considering that the very French-sounding Infogrames name probably wasn’t helping the company’s fortunes in the USA at the moment…
Source: Gamesindustry.biz
