Atari CEO Wade Rosen has been doing the rounds on the interview circuit recently, not only discussing his company's recent purchase of a controlling stake in Thunderful but also the performance of the Atari 2600+ and 7800+ systems and future merchandising opportunities.
Rosen has also been speaking to the lovely folks over at VGC, and has revealed the three games he'd love to see remastered as part of Atari's ongoing efforts to preserve and celebrate retro games, via its Digital Eclipse and Nightdive studios.
Speaking about games he'd love to see get another shot at fame, Rosen said:
“Life’s too short, you know? I’ve got mine too, right? If we ever had a chance to work on Panzer Dragoon Saga or Ogre Battle or Snatcher or something like that… I mean, I don’t know if it would do well, but I’d probably push it through and make sure we did it just because I would love to work on one of those. But it all has to be in a balance. If this company just became like ‘what games does Wade want to work on?’ we would not be around too long.”
Orge Battle is one Rosen has mentioned before, but Snatcher and Panzer Dragoon Saga are two games that retro collectors will be instantly familiar with.
Designed and written by Hideo Kojima, Snatcher is a visual novel which launched on a wide range of systems, but the only version to recieve a Western release was for the Sega CD / Mega CD. It's now worth an absolute fortune – as is Panzer Dragoon Saga, an epic four-disc Saturn RPG which was released in tiny quantities in North America and Europe.
While Rosen is keen to point out that a balance is needed for these kinds of things, he cites two other recent projects as proof that Atari is keen to explore both sides of the spectrum:
"Where you can, the end goal is always to try and do something that is both something we genuinely have a lot of passion about and has a lot of commercial viability. I think a good example of that would be Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, right? People have joined and applied to be a part of Digital Eclipse to work on that series. That is not something that we reluctantly took on, people are so excited about that. And yeah, we think that’s going to have a really strong commercial viability to it."
He then speaks about a title that is arguably at the other end of the scale – LucasArts' Outlaws, which was largely forgotten by many PC players until it was recently announced as Nightdive's next remaster. He says it is "a little bit more passion than raw numbers-driven decision-making."
Rosen adds that there's "give and take in any business," before saying:
"If you go too far in any one direction – if you’re only numbers-driven, it crushes the spirit of the company. If you’re only passion-driven, well, you oftentimes don’t have a company. We’re seeing a lot of both of those in the industry right now, and so we try to straddle the line. But we definitely let the team pick a… you know, we all work together and choose jointly what we’re going to work on, but there will definitely be a few like Outlaws that the team kind of throws out and I’m like ‘yeah, let’s give it a swing’.”