When the
Atari, Inc. division of
Warner Communications lost $500 million in the first three quarters of 1983, its arcade coin-op division was the only one to make money. In 1984, Warner sold Atari's consumer products division to
Jack Tramiel; he named this company
Atari Corporation. Warner retained the coin-op division and a few other assets and changed the name of Atari, Inc. to Atari Games, Inc. Atari Ireland was a subsidiary of Atari Games that manufactured its games for the European market; while under Namco, Atari Ireland also manufactured
Sega's
Hang-On (1985) for the European market. Atari Games continued to manufacture arcade games and units, and starting in 1988, also sold cartridges for the
Nintendo Entertainment System under the
Tengen brand name. The Tengen name was used for its home consumer division that released games, while its home games were mainly developed by Atari Games staff. The companies exchanged a number of lawsuits in the late 1980s related to disputes over the rights to
Tetris, of which Tengen had published
a version for the NES, and Tengen's circumvention of Nintendo's lockout chip, which prevented third parties from creating unauthorized games. (Atari Games' legal battles with Nintendo were separate from those of Atari Corporation, which also exchanged lawsuits with Nintendo in the late 1980s and early 1990s.) The suit finally reached a settlement in 1994, with Atari Games paying Nintendo cash damages and use of several patent licenses. In 1989, Warner Communications merged with
Time Inc., forming Time Warner. In 1994, Time Warner reacquired a controlling interest in Atari Games and made it a subsidiary of its
Time Warner Interactive division. While the company initially maintained the Atari Games brand for arcade games under the new ownership, the Tengen brand was dropped in favor of the Time Warner Interactive label for its home console games. On July 12, 1994, Nakajima died at the age of 64.
Ed Logg, who was a chief programmer of Atari, briefly left the company for Electronic Arts, only to rejoin Atari Games in 1995 to run its home console games. Time Warner Interactive, via Atari Games became a member of the Nintendo Ultra 64's Dream Team in the mid-1990s. In April 1996, after an unsuccessful bid by Atari co-founder
Nolan Bushnell, the company was sold to
WMS Industries, owners of the Williams,
Bally and
Midway arcade brands, which restored the use of the Atari Games name, while the home consumer division was folded into
Williams Entertainment, with its existing home consumer division was kept. According to Atari Games president Dan Van Elderen, in 1995, Time Warner decided to exit the video game business and instructed the management at Atari Games to find a buyer for themselves, which surprised him because usually parent companies choose the buyers for their subsidiaries. With the changes in ownership of the two companies, on November 19, 1999, Atari Games Corporation was renamed Midway Games West Inc., Although no longer in operation, Midway Games West continued to exist as a holding entity for the copyrights and trademarks of the games originally from Atari Games. In February 2009, Midway Games filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and in July 2009, most of Midway's assets were sold to Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, ultimately bringing all of the Atari Games properties back to Time Warner again. == Games ==