By Patrick Garratt

Speaking with Edge In Person's Jörg Tittel at Gamescom, Atari CEO Wade Rosen set out how a brand that once nearly took the videogame industry down with it rebuilt itself around a single idea: own retro completely while avoiding conflict.

Atari does not need introducing, but it does need updating. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the company built the commercial template for home videogames before careening off the rails. Flooding the market with cartridges that simply wouldn’t sell, it was at the centre of the 1983 industry crash that warned a generation of investors that games were a fad. Atari's brand survived, changed hands repeatedly over the following decades, and settled, eventually, into something closer to a licence than a company: a name attached to slot machines and the occasional oddity.

The version of Atari that exists today was rebuilt largely out of public view. Rosen explained how he bought out the company’s previous chief executive in 2020 and became CEO himself around a year later, before going silent for two years.

We can't do everything

"It feels like we've only been here since 2023, because we've really only been public about what we're doing since 2023," Rosen said.

"The first two years were rebuilding the company and refocusing it into games." Only once that foundation was in place did Rosen settle on a strategy. "We have to be very focused. We can't do everything. Let's be great at something. What can we be best in the world at, and what would be appropriate for the brand?"

The answer was rooted in Atari's past. Rosen was direct about the new Atari's mission: "I think we're best in the world at retro."

The retro focus extends to how Atari positions itself relative to the platform holders on which it depends. With Sony set to retire physical PlayStation media in 2028 and Microsoft expected to follow suit, retro-focused companies including Atari and the UK's Blaze Entertainment, which produces the physical-only Evercade, are finding themselves opportunistically placed. Atari's retro collections skew unusually towards physical for a modern publisher.

"As a proportion of our sales, while it's not the majority, it's a larger proportion for us than for other game companies," Rosen said, citing the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection as an example that performed strongly on shelves. Sony's move away from disc-based hardware bothers him personally as a collector, though he is careful not to be dragged by PlayStation's strategy. "We're not out there trying to compete with 800lb gorillas, because we can't," he said. "Maybe someday we can. But that's not today, nor do we want to. Nor does that seem like a pathway to success."

That stance carries through to every platform holder Atari works with.

"What I like about Atari right now is we're kind of a Switzerland for gaming," he said. "It's a big brand, a brand that almost everybody knows and recognises, but it's also a brand that almost everybody has really fond memories of, or a favourable attitude towards, and we've cultivated that intentionally."

PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, Nintendo and Steam are all partners to Rosen: "We work closely with everybody, and we have a really good relationship with everybody." Atari does release its own hardware, including a Pac-Man-themed 2600+ console Rosen says sold well this year, but the boundary is explicit: whatever comes next should "stay in the wheelhouse of what we are great at," never "something that would feel competitive with our key partners, because having a good relationship with them is important to us, and we need that to survive."

Buying a liability, not an asset

The retro strategy has been built through a small number of deliberate signings rather than a broad buying spree.

"We made a shortlist. Of the top three, two of those were Digital Eclipse and Nightdive," Rosen said, Digital Eclipse for collections and Nightdive for remasters, including its 2025 update of Looking Glass's System Shock 2. Digital Eclipse's Atari 50 became the proof of concept, a project Rosen still calls his favourite thing the company has made, "like a Criterion Collection release in a way," combining remastered games with documentary material exploring Atari's history. Its reception led directly to Atari acquiring the studio. Rosen credits much of that relationship to Digital Eclipse's studio head, Mike Mika, a former journalist at Edge sister title Next Gen: "I like this guy. If this is what people in videogames are like, videogames are amazing." A third studio, 32-bit-era emulation specialist Implicit Conversions, was acquired this year.

The atypicality of Rosen's attitude towards building Atari is underlined by the manner in which he approaches studio acquisitions, especially in light of the current horrors of Xbox's very public implosion. Buying a company is a risk he takes personally.

"When you buy a studio, you're not buying assets, you're buying a liability," he said, pointing to Atari's own history as the cautionary tale: the company that previously carried the Atari name expanded through acquisition and, in his words, "blew up like a shooting star."

Keeping the roster small is the discipline that focus requires. As Rosen put it, returning to the idea that has defined his time at Atari so far: "You just have to be the best in the world at something. I really believe that it doesn't have to be the biggest thing."