Not to be confused for Atari Corp. For other uses of Atari, see Atari (disambiguation).
Atari Games is a game company formed in 1984-85. The company also operated under the brand name Tengen for the home console market. Several Pac-Man games, and ports of preexisting games, were developed and/or published by Atari Games.
History
Atari Games was formed following the video game crash of 1983, in which Atari Inc. was split into two separate companies; Atari Corp., focusing on the home console market, and Atari Games, focusing on the arcade market. Namco owned a majority share in Atari Games, with Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Namco, being appointed as chairman of the company.[1] Due to these connections, Pac-Mania was published by Atari Games in North America. In 1987, Atari Games formed a new subsidiary known as Atari Operations, Inc., which focused on physical arcade locations.
In the later 1980s, Atari Games began producing games for the home console market under the name Tengen; the Tengen name was used so as to not cause confusion between Atari Corp.'s products. Infamously, Tengen released numerous games for the NES without permission from Nintendo, leading to numerous lawsuits over copyright and patent infringement. Despite being unlicensed by Nintendo, the Pac-Man releases were licensed by Namco; as such, they are commonly considered "official" Pac-Man games. Tengen is most notable for its variants of Ms. Pac-Man, which include additional levels and features.
In mid-1990, Namco sold its company share back to Atari Games. In exchange for selling their share, Namco would acquire the Atari Operations company, the majority of its then-operating arcade locations, and several European Atari facilities.[1] Namco would rename Atari Operations to Namco Operations, later known as Namco USA (among other names); the Namco USA company ultimately closed in 2019.
Atari Games, as well as Tengen, would later be dissolved into Time Warner Interactive; Time Warner's game library would later be sold to Williams, who rebranded as Midway Games shortly thereafter. Following a bankruptcy proceeding in 2009, the Atari Games/Tengen catalogue was re-acquired by Warner Bros.[1]
Pac-Man releases
- Arcade - Pac-Mania
- NES (Tengen) - Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Mania; all three games had variants unauthorized by Nintendo, with Pac-Man having a briefly-issued licensed version in 1988. A non-Tengen, Namco-published version of Pac-Man was released in 1993, alongside a redone port of Ms. Pac-Man.
- Sega Genesis (Tengen) - Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Mania
- Sega Master System (Tengen) - Ms. Pac-Man
- SNES (Williams) - Ms. Pac-Man; a port of the Tengen Sega Genesis version, following Williams' acquisition of the Time Warner library. Some promotional material uses the Midway Games name.
Tengen-licensed regional bootlegs
Outside of North America, Tengen is known to have "licensed" NES games to other bootleg manufacturers on the side. These releases are commonly confused for fully unauthorized products; though in reality, they are "official" in the same capacity as the US Tengen releases. The following unlicensed Pac-Man NES releases were released under a Tengen contract:
- Home Entertainment Suppliers, commonly abbreviated as "HES", released NES cartridges of Pac-Man for the Australian market. Pac-Man would also be included in a "Total Funpak" multicart, alongside three unlicensed NES games: Sidewinder, Duck Maze, and Othello.
- To surpass the NES's "lockout chip", HES would (rather infamously) attach a cartridge slot to the Pac-Man cartridge; the player would attach a licensed NES game to this slot, thus bypassing the lockout chip. Some cartridges feature the slot molded into the plastic (referred to as "piggyback" games by collectors), while others merely attach a loose "dongle" held by an open ribbon cable.
- The Phantom System is a NES clone released in Brazil by Gradiente; Pac-Man would be released under Tengen's license for the Phantom System.[2]
- South Korean company Daou Infosys, along with their distributor, Haitai Electronics, held a Tengen contract for game licenses. Despite this, Haitai's releases of Pac-Man seem to be fully bootleg copies of the game, making it unclear if Pac-Man in particular was Tengen-licensed.
Trivia
- For a brief period following Namco's alliance with Atari Games, the company operated under the name "AT Games Inc."; this company is completely unrelated to the 2001-founded AtGames Holdings Ltd., with the similar names merely being a coincidence.