The other company is a 100+ year old Hanfuta Playing Card company gone Video game company that's among the biggest in the world and probably the second most innovative to the other company. The company is Japanese, a big corporation, has a long line of CEO from the same bloodline, and seems as of late to buy into the very American practice of suing the bejeesus out of anyone who dares host their Intellectual Property on their website or speak of them in a light they don't like.

Every day this year (2024) it seems another Corporation goes under fire in this country. I don't think there's a single corporation, in the world, who is 100% innocent of any sort of white collar crimes at this point. It does not make me happy to say or think this either, because corporations SHOULD be following the law. We just had a CEO from my Insurance shot to death in cold blood in New York (which opened up a can of worms about our healthcare system in America), our President Elect has sunk numerous corporations of his own, his south african buddy with the electric cars and rockets isn't making a good case for himself either. Business people are really screwing up a lot lately, but one company isn't, ATARI.

As one might have noticed, I'm not a consumer so much as a customer. I buy goods from you, and I intend to keep them a long, long time, maybe lifelong. But if you do good as a company, I have no problem spending money with your organization for other things along the line as you progress. That's a big reason I don't support a LOT of "lamestream" stuff if I can help it, because, as Henry Rollins once sang in the punk band Black Flag "Swimming, in the mainstream, is such a lame dream!".

While I am an avid "gamer", I'm also not one of those lunatics that makes it their whole life. As you notice, I'm also a musician, I.T. Guy, budding network and InfoSec guy, mechanic, and overally tinkerer and handyman. I have plenty to do, and spending my whole paycheck on games and ssytems I'm not sure about, is not something I do. I took business in college, and one thing that struck me in a big way was my prof telling the class that "Business is all about managing risk" - Business IS A risk, and I've understood that since I started my own Lawn Mowing operation as a teenager.

The problem is, it seems in modern business, businesses in general are less about "Managing Risk" and more about "eliminating risk and competition completely". Total domination of a market (or multiples as a olgliarch or Monopoly, just ask Google or Microsoft). I understand it's competitive, but it's competitive for a reason - the competition (when performed properly) bolsters innovation, gives every company a chance to shine, and provides more options for customers than just one or a few.

Now, I'm not putting down Nintendo at all. They've done a LOT of great things in previous years, they did basically revive the entire video game market with the NES in 1985, attempted to put in protections that kept the consumer from feeling gyped by poor quality products (seal of quality, ensured by limitations placed on how many games a company can make a year, and what hardware they can use to do it), they created a 64-bit console and it was truly 64-bit (vs. the Atari Jaguar which was a bit of a lie), but that was in the 80's-90's. Atari, in the 80's, did every fuck-up imaginable as well as the good they did too. But that was a different time. Have to remember, Video Games, in the 80's and 90's, were considered a KID'S TOY, and hencefourth, once you turned 20-something, you were to get rid of that NES or Atari unit, and be out doing drugs, fucking, and learning who you were. Being a adult "gamer" back then was quite a few shades lighter than being LGTBQA+ at that time in the public's eyes back then (they called em' Sexual Deviants at the time - not wanting to trigger anyone, just pointing out the truth of history). But hey, Lamestream, what I can I say.

But it's 2024, these are different times, the tables have turned. STDS, the war on drugs, the Opioid Crisis, rising awareness of Alcoholism (to go with rising Alcoholism), the economy, hyperinflation, the internet, and many other things have happened, as well as cultural shifts, which have made the age old practices of what I'd call "true Adulting" (trying to act like an Adult to feel like one, not because you ARE one) no longer a desirable past-time for anyone with a brain cell. Suddenly, being a 20+ year old human who likes playing video games no longer looks so terrible. Actually, seems to be quite a sensible past-time, especially if it does not cost a lot of money.

Right now, Nintendo is using/C&D'ing websites that offer ROMs for their legacy systems that are off the market. This is so that you have to buy them - er **ahem** the "right" to PLAY them - rather than have a physical copy. This means, anyone with an older system, is left out in the cold. They don't make NES cartridges anymore, I'm surprised they're not suing 3rd party companies for making controller repros, they don't offer any virtual anything on hard-copy that you can move to your next system, and you cannot use any of the services their old consoles (DS-series and Wii-Series) without hacking the console somehow, which also has drawn their ire.

At the same time, Atari is selling physical cartridges, reissue systems that recreate the original vibe of playing games with remakes of original controllers nad hardware, all WHILE offering a similiar offerings to Nintendo at the same time (Gamestation Pro, the VCS (not the 1977 classic, the fancy computer that looks like a modernized 2600 from 2020, are still for sale). Priot to this, Atari was allowing the creation of consoles that had hackable capabilities (ie. the Atari Flashback 2 with a user-mod for adding a Cartridge slot to play your old carts on it). Overall, that pretty cool and pro-user for a company. Heck, they even allow the NEW stuff to work with your OLD Atari systems like your old 2600 or 7800 system. And they're leaving ROM sites alone from what I can tell, honestly, their ALLOWING people to use them and even offering the official sale of "Digital Copies" (read ROMS) of their software for the purpose of promoting their physical copies of the media.

The reason this is so cool to me in the latter case, is that we live in a time where our rights to repair and modify our hardware, and have physical copies of media are being heavily challenged by the greedy elite that run various industries. This has been a concern of mine long before now, when nobody ever read the EULA in their Microsoft Windows box (I did). Basically, since the beginning of computing, the right to USE the content held within the media has always been a contract.