What, what? Atari Still Exists?

Not really. Atari's U.S. operations filed for bankruptcy yesterday, hoping to separate from the faltering Atari S.A., the company's base in France, in order to further spur an increasingly promising performance in digital and mobile content, and licensing in the United States and perhaps save the French side as well.

But don't let news of bankruptcy worry you. Atari's not dying - because it really hasn't been alive for the last thirty years. Even though last year was the 40^th anniversary of "Atari," the famous maker of "Pong" and the classic home video game console actually died in 1983. It's just a company with the name Atari that's filing for bankruptcy.

Atari S.A. is a part of Infogrames, a French holding company which got the right to the Atari name in 2000 after buying Hasbro Interactive, which owned Atari Interactive. The French company ultimately changed its own name in 2009 to Atari S.A., undoubtedly because of the old-school cred associated with the name.

But before that, it was Hasbro who bought the Atari name in 1998 from JTS, the maker of hard drives, other computer storage, and, with Atari's help, occasionally computers. JTS and Atari only merged after Atari Corp. had its last spectacular failure with the 64-bit Jaguar in the early 90s.

Remember the Jaguar? That was the most recent time anything recognizably "Atari" was introduced to the gaming market (not counting the iPhone Pong games or whatever old stuff "Atari" licenses these days).

And before the Jaguar, Atari Corporation - as it was known between 1984 and its merger with JTS - unsuccessfully tried cracking into the PC market and also handheld games, which it lost in 1989 to Nintendo's Game Boy.

It was only before the video game crash of 1983 that "Atari" was really Atari, Inc.: Founded in 1972, maker of the Atari 2600, purveyor of those big upright cabinet arcade games like Asteroids, Missile Command, Pacman, Breakout, Pong, etc.

So "Atari" may be filing for bankruptcy, but Atari has been in video-game heaven for some time now.