Napoleon Complexes

Have you ever dreamed of staying in a hotel themed around the most popular video game console of 1979? No, of course you haven't, which makes this move by the company calling itself (but isn't) Atari, and the almost certainly a scam GSD Group, so baffling.

Do you have vague memories of Atari? Great. Wanna stay in a hotel
about it? No? Yeah, me neither. It's weird that this is a thing, right? 

Pictured: Jaguar fighting game
Kasumi Ninja, seen here, sucking.

Ok, some background first. You might remember Atari as a video game company from the 70's whose hubris and stubborn refusal to adapt to the realities of the industry led them to ruin. Twice. The first time by pining all their hopes on a rushed and famously terrible game based on E.T. It was so poorly received that Atari buried the unsold and returned copies in a New Mexico desert. The second time was with the release of the Atari Jaguar console which was objectively terrible, yet shockingly never ended up buried in the desert.

Anyway, it's more likely that you remember them as that logo on t-shirts sold at Hot Topic in the early 00's.The name has been passed around a dozen times since its heyday and Atari is more of a brand than video game company.

It's the Weekend at Bernie's of brands.

"Whoa, I'd better pre-order
one before they sell out."

                                       -no one, ever

In fairness, the company currently wearing the Atari skin-suit did announce a new game console back in 2017. Called the VCS, after the original name for the 2600, this new console will play both classic Atari games, more recent games and will also feature streaming capabilities and a web browser-exactly like every electronic device in your home including whatever you're reading this on. And it costs between two and three hundred dollars, which is how much the current generation of actual game consoles cost. But hey, it's got wood paneling!

Pictured: tech industry people innovating
 and strategizing. Which they assure us
is totally a real job you guys. 100%.

So while exactly zero people from the original company have anything to do with the Atari of 2020, the aforementioned hubris definitely tracks. But what the hell then, is GSD? The group, according to founder Shelly Murphy's Linkedin page "is a leading innovation and strategy group with experience in finance, education, entertainment and creating innovative verticals with legacy brands." So bullshit artists. Wait, no, "artist" suggests creativity. Vultures. They're bullshit vultures.

Napoleon Smith III seen here leaning
on an antique car that definitely goes
"aaooga" when you honk the horn.

Anyway, Murphy and her partner, the extravagantly named producer of the Michael Bay Ninja Turtle movies (really) Napoleon Smith III, worked out a deal with NotAtari to use the game publisher's name on a chain of theme hotels. You know, so they can create some innovative verticals with a legacy brand? In Napoleon's own corporate gibberish words:

"When creating this brand-new hotel concept, we knew that Atari would be the perfect way to give guests the 'nostalgic and retro meets modern' look and feel we were going for. Let's face it, how cool will it be to stay inside an Atari?!"

-Napoleon Smith III, following a
question mark with an exclamation
point-which should be illegal

Pictured: exactly how cool
it is inside an Atari. 

It would not be cool. Not at all. Now admittedly I have a bit of a prejudice towards Atari-era video games owning to their primitiveness and general terribleness, but some people still wax nostalgic for the days of incomprehensible graphics and the shrill screech of what passed for sound effects in the age of disco. Convinced that this synergistic leveraging of brand association (ugh...) will be a hit, they're starting with a hotel in Phoenix, with plans to expand to cities like San Francisco, San Jose and Las Vegas among others.

It's the same insulting logic that suggests
that gamers require gamer-themed soda
 instead of whatever normal humans drink.

Here's some of their questionable reasoning from the Atarihotels website:

"More than 2.5 billion gamers across the world spend more than $152.1 billion (US) on games in 2019 alone; an increase of +9.6% year on year. One of the most distinctive trends in gaming is gamers gravitating toward recognizable intellectual property."

-Atari Hotels laying out thier

specious business plan

Do gamblers stay in hotels with-
oh, right...ok, bad example.

Lots of people buy video games, and they often stick with series they're familiar with. That's all true, but does any of that translate into reasons to stay in a hotel? In Phoenix? Like, I myself am a video game fan, but never have I found myself staying in a hotel and wishing it were more thematically linked to my favorite pass time. Is this a thing people experience? Do say, woodworking enthusiasts go to a Holiday Inn and long for en suite lathe or a complimentary mitre saw on the pillow?

There's not enough Lysol in the world.

According to the announcement, Atari hotels will have usual hotel trappings like meeting rooms, gyms and restaurants as well as in-room entertainment like VR and AR devices in the rooms which-look, I don't like touching the TV remote in a hotel room much less slapping some communal VR gear to my face, but cool, to each their own. And they'd also like to be a venue for esports-which is weird given that it's a sport famously dominated by people way too young to remember Atari.

Look, I'm not a business analyst, but I don't think I'm being a naysayer for naysaying's sake when I predict that this whole thing is doomed. Doomed. I wish Shelly Murphy and Napoleon Smith III all the luck in the world as they innovate their vertical legacies or whatever, but I am gob smacked-like, smacked right in the gob-by how they came to the conclusion that there's enough lingering fondness for Atari to justify a whole chain of hotels.

Finally, you can actually spend the night
 inside a cynical exploitation of your nostalgia!

-Atarihotels' actual slogan*

*no it's not.