Phil Harrison began his career in the late 1980s, at Mindscape. He spent many years at Sony, guiding the PlayStation through three generations. He is now president of Atari.
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Today in London David Gardner and I, along with some of our publishing partners, will be showing Atari’s 2009 line-up to our retail distribution partners as well as members of the business and specialist press. I’d like to take this opportunity to share our message, via Edge, directly with all our friends in the game industry.

Up until now we’ve been fairly quiet about our activities, but we’ve been working on three fronts.

We’ve been transforming the company internally, working on a lot of restructuring and reorganization. We have also secured our distribution business future with our strategic partnership with Namco Bandai. And we have reenergized our publishing business with a fantastic range of development partners.

The key message that I want to get across is the tremendous talent that we are fortunate enough to be working with at Atari. That is what’s going to bring us strength as a publisher.

Internal Work

Securing a strong distribution presence is absolutely necessary. We are building studios internally. Paulina Bozek joined the company recently and she is hard at work recruiting. But the fruits of her labor are going to take a while to reach the market.

Whatever aspirations we have for building IP with our own studios are going to take a little bit of time. But we want to continue to grow the company. The products I’m going to talk about here have an excellent market opportunity.

Our focus in the year ahead is on an increased number of releases, a concentration on higher quality products, and on products that we can position well in the marketplace. We are finding our own space in the marketplace rather than squeezing into overcrowded genres.

Some of those internal re-orgs I mentioned are going to help. Bringing Atari Inc., which was our US publicly traded subsidiary back into the group as a private wholly owned company has eliminated a lot of cost and distraction. Now we have one management world wide, one vision world wide, one goal - building a publishing portfolio that is worthy of the Atari brand. In the year ahead I want Atari to be recognized for bringing innovative, exciting games to the market. That will be Step One in our reinvention.

Namco Bandai

Our main message is focused around the strength of our distribution capability which has been bolstered through our recently announced joint venture partnership with Namco Bandai in which they will own 34% of our sales and distribution companies in what we define as the PAL-Asian regions.

This deal gives Namco Bandai a distribution footprint in areas where they’re very keen to have a strong presence, which they’ve not had before. It also brings exclusivity over their product line to our distribution company.

We’re showing four major products from Namco Bandai to the market for the first time: Family Ski & Snowboard, Eternal Sonata, Afro Samurai, and, of course, Tekken 6 (pictured).



All these games have the quality, variety and personality we’ve come to expect from Namco Bandai. Afro Samurai is a stunning action game that oozes style, and features Samuel Jackson as the voice talent.

In the history of the Tekken franchise, 33 million units have been sold world wide as well as countless coins slotted into arcade machines throughout its life.

For the first time, Tekken 6 is a multi format product. The fact that Namco Bandai is bringing that to the market through us in the PAL Asia territories speaks volumes for our distribution abilities.

Today is an opportunity for us to recognize Namco Bandai’s importance as a publishing partner and also as a strategic investor partner in our distribution business. But we have also been working with other partners around the world

Telltale Games

Today, we are announcing a distribution relationship with Telltale Games for Sam and Max (pictured below). Previously a digital distribution product only, we’re bringing that to retail through a world wide distribution relationship.



Gas Powered Games

We are also working with Gas Powered Games on Demigod (pictured below) in the PAL Asian market. I want to say a quick ‘get well soon’ to my friend Chris Taylor, who was due to join us on stage but he’s hurt his back which is a shame because he’s such a great presenter!




CCP

Hilmar Petursson, the CEO of CCP, is in London today to talk about our retail distribution agreement for Eve Online (pictured below). Despite being one of the most successful MMOs in the world, with 250,000 subscribers, it’s been many, many years since Eve has been a premium retail SKU. Part of our strategy is to use the strength of our distribution capability around the world to bring MMO products to retail. This is an important message for our retail partners that, even though we have an online business model as our future, that is not to the exclusion of profit and opportunity for retailers.



Ready 2 Rumble

We are also announcing that we are bringing back Ready 2 Rumble for Wii which will feature trademarks like those amazing caricature fighters and, of course, Michael Buffer. It’s completely over the top and a lot of fun and perfect for the Wii, making very good use of the nunchuck and the Wiimote.

CD Projekt

We’re also announcing, along with our friends at CD Projekt, a plan to bring The Witcher RPG franchise to console later in 2009. Those guys have rebuilt The Witcher (pictured below) from the ground up for console; and they’ve also rebuilt it for PC with The Witcher Enhanced Edition. They sold over a million units on the PC which is pretty rare for any PC title. We are very pleased to be bringing it to the console SKUs, especially because it’s not just a port; it is using the same story but it is building new gameplay, new control mechanisms and new features for the PS3 and Xbox 360.



Q Entertainment

We’re also talking about our strategic partnership with Q Entertainment, home of the amazingly talented Tetsuya Mizuguchi. We have two relationships with Q. One is to bring three very successful XBLA titles to retail in one pack called Q3 (Qubed) [working title]. The games are Rez HD, Every Extend Extra Extreme, and Lumines Live, which will all be in one pack on one disc for a very aggressive price. Also, we are announcing a brand new title that we’re developing with Mizuguchi and his team called QJ which, as the name suggests, is a music performance action game which will be initially on the Wii but we are looking at other platforms including online.



Simbin and Others

Henrik Roos from SimBin is also going to be showing how those guys will be bringing their excellent racing simulation games like RACE Pro to console. Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (PS3, Xbox 360, PC) and Ghostbusters (PS3, Xbox 360, PS2, PC, DS, Wii) are also on show. Atari also has an additional line-up of published titles which we are showing for the first time including Heroes Over Europe, an action flight simulation game from Transmission Games. Also, Codename Panzers and a DS game called The Chase, which we’re going to be launching in time for Valentines Day.

The Future

As I’ve said here, the purpose of this event in London is to demonstrate our commitment to retail distribution on a global basis. But anyone who has been following Atari recently will understand that we have very strong opinions about how the game distribution business will evolve in the years ahead. That hasn’t changed and you’ll certainly be hearing more from us in the near future. But for now, we are focused on building a strong publishing and distribution business along with our partners.