The idea I posed to Atari CEO Wade Rosen this past spring was simple: We’d find a spot to sit down at the gaming conference we were both attending in Las Vegas. I’d open my laptop to a list of every game Atari had published since he took charge in 2021. We’d talk about each one, in order.
This was a potentially time-consuming project. The Atari of the last five years has been prolific, publishing nearly one game a month. We’d have an hour, max. We’d need to talk about more than 50 games.
I also wasn’t sure if it’d be awkward. Atari had tried a lot of things in recent years. Some releases, such as the Atari 50 retro collection, were obvious hits, but there’d been a lot of misses. I wasn’t sure how he’d handle discussing the flops.
Thankfully, Rosen was game, refreshingly so.
Across two interviews—one conducted in Vegas last April and a second via a video call in October—Rosen and I covered nearly every Atari-published game since the start of his run. That’s 61 games, from September 2021’s Centipede Recharged through today’s Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered.
We would talk about…
Games like Atari Mania that Rosen thinks missed the mark (“It should be more fun than it is, in candor”)
And games like Atari 50 that hit it (“This is probably my favorite game that we’ve done since I’ve been here.”)
The game that was pitched to Rosen as “Missile Command mixed with Inscryption”
And why Atari didn’t delay the Metroidvania that they released last year on the same day as Silksong
We discussed when Steam reviews are a good proxy for sales… and when they’re not
When he’s let a dev team proceed with a game that might not be a big money-maker
Plus much, much more.
Even if you’ve not kept up with modern Atari, I think you’ll be interested in how this conversation tracks a company trying to find its way, one game at a time.
I’ve never done an interview quite like this.