Atari has been through a lot as a company. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded it in 1972. They sold it to Warner Communication in 1976. Ray Kassar ran it through the crash of 1983, after which he was forced out due to accusations of insider trading. Warner split Atari into Atari Games (arcade) and Atari Consumer Electronics (hardware). The latter was sold but kept the name Atari. In 1996, that Atari entered into a reverse merger with JT Storage, and in 1998 Hasbro Interactive acquired all its assets. They created a new subsidiary called Atari Interactive. Infogrames bought Hasbro Interactive in 2001, and started licensing the name Atari in 2003, before finally acquiring the entirety of Atari, Inc.'s assets in 2008 and renaming the company Atari. Whew.

Today's bizarro Atari has relaunched their website, and among its contents is something actually worthwhile: an arcade section with six classic Atari games, which are playable on in-browser emulators. The games include Atari VCS games Adventure and Yars' Revenge (both of which Nick and I cover in Racing the Beam), and coin-op games Asteroids, Battlezone, and Crystal Castles, and Lunar Lander.

The emulators are incredibly impressive Flash-based browser embeds. These are real emulators running original ROMS, not poor copies of the originals. I hadn't heard of their creator, Code Mystics, but digging around I wasn't surprised to see that the company was founded earlier this year by Jeff Vavasour. Vavasour was one of the technical leads on various emulated console ports, and he probably has more experience in this area than anybody. He also makes an appearance in Racing the Beam, for his work on a single-player adaptation of Pong.