Author: Ragstaff (nme-pr1.tpgi.com.au)
Date: 05-09-2003 12:59
The name "Atari" is well known, and we've sort of had to ourselves for all these years - longer than I would have thought actually.
Any company that operates under the Atari name has instant recognition world-wide. I think I read somewhere that to pay for a marketing campaign that would make a new brand-name as well known as Atari across the world would cost hundreds of millions of dollars - even a billion. AND that to actually achieve the image they have - retro, cool, youthful, intelligent, inovative, "punk" etc, is nearly priceless. Companies TRY to get that, with huge budgets, and they still fail.
We were lucky to have had it to ourselves, to be able to type "atari" into a search engine and have everything come back that is from "the scene". It won't be like that now (Hey, that has been changing since Infogrames started putting games out on the atari label). It's going to be "everyones" again soon, which licks major crabs' b-hind.
The same thing happened to me with Lord Of The Rings. I used to read those books when I was younger, I started reading books of Tolkeins letters, biographies, essays, rare shorter stories etc for years.
Then the movies came out and all of a sudden it was "cool" and every one loves it. You go to a shopping centre and you see Lord Of The Rings posters in book shops and Video shops, merchandise in toy shops and big retailers, it's on the covers of magazines. You see ads that have something to do with it on TV and in newspapers. It's no longer a "scene", it's main-stream.
Lets Infogrames at least change the logo a bit...
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