Dude, We Should Have Bought Midway

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Midway's largest shareholder, Sumner Redstone, has taken a huge load of debt off of his table by practically giving away his 87 percent stake in Midway. The shares were picked up by an investor named Mark Thomas, who picked up the shares for around $100,000--but he'll also assume $70 million in debt.

I think I speak for us all when I say... dude, that's a lot of debt!

Aside from letting Redstone save around $800 million in taxes, the impact of this move hasn't really been realized, so it's hard to say what this actually means for Midway. But it's probably safe to say that Thomas didn't get himself into this situation if he didn't see a clear way out of it. Will he keep the company together in its current form? Or will he blast it apart and sell off the company's properties in the hopes of getting more than $70,100,000 for them?

Maybe he's just a really big Smash TV fan who was fed up by the company's inability to produce a sequel. Midway hasn't really been too great at exploiting its back catalog. Aside from a few compilations on the last generation of console and some passable-but-plain emulated games on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, there's a lot of stuff they could be tapping into. Here's a few lists of stuff I would bring back and stuff I would continue to ignore.

I'll leave Mortal Kombat out of this since it's as close to a sure thing as Midway has at the moment. Obviously, anyone involved in this process should keep making MK games.

Smash TV - This dual-joystick shooter got a spiritual successor in the form of Total Carnage, but with reality TV still plaguing society, another funny Running Man-like shooter would be first on my list as a four-player co-op/competitive dual-joystick shooter. Still, this would probably work best as a digital download.

Spy Hunter - Those Xbox/PS2 updates were decent, and no one's really doing anything too interesting with car combat these days. If paired with a driving engine that could really deliver a sense of speed while still allowing for weapons-based shenanigans, this could still work. Just leave The Rock out of it next time.

Psi-Ops - I'm not-so-secretly hoping that this "better than Gears 2" secret game that Midway has in the pipeline is a Psi-Ops game. Don't make it a sequel, because only crazy people remember the first game. Just make a wild physics game that succeeds where Star Wars: The Force Unleashed struggled. Aaaaaand then find a way to market it, since you can't just slap "Star Wars" on the box.

While I was at it, I'd probably try to line up more stuff from the back catalog for release on XBLA and PSN, using games like Bionic Commando Rearmed and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix as the model. I bet an updated version of Primal Rage could do OK. Kids love dinosaurs. I'd love to see a Xybots sequel. And, of course, there's always Rampage, which seems to sell way better than anyone expects every time they put out a new one.

What about you? Are there any classics from the old Midway/Atari Games catalog that you think would help dig the company out of its gigantic debt hole?