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by vintermann 1374 days ago
No, the Atari name exists today. Famous defunct company names regularly get bought by entities wanting to cash out whatever goodwill or positive associations still left in them. Would-be buyers with less extractive ambitions can't compete in the auctions.

So no, Atari doesn't exist today, what exists is a company wearing Atari's skin as a suit, in order to fool you. Don't be fooled by names without the organisational continuity to back it up.

2 comments

I think of the definitive example as Schwinn bicycles.
Another famous example of this "brand" re-use that I only recently found out about: AEG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEG

Yeah but Electrolux is still a good brand.

Better example is AKG which used to be well respected for making high-quality headphones, until Samsung bought their parent company and started just using their logo from 2017 on cheap crap.

The original engineers formed a different company Austrian Audio (no article on wiki apparently)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKG_(company)