Atari Gobbles Up Cryptic Studios

Last week we got a good look at The New Atari, purveyors of Riddick: Dark Athena, Ghostbusters, and an upcoming console version of The Witcher, among other titles. All the credit can't go to Phil Harrison, but you have to admit, things really appear to be on the up and up over there since he took the reins.

Seems like Atari--or rather, its corporate overlord, Infogrames--saved the biggest news for last. It's gone and bought Cryptic Studios, the people behind the City of Heroes games and the forthcoming Champions Online and Star Trek Online.

Good thing making MMOs is Cryptic's forte, because they're going to be doing a lot more of that!

Atari will benefit from Cryptic's powerful proprietary engine, scalable content development tools and online server architecture to deliver very high productivity-per-employee and industry-leading client/server performance and create unique, high quality MMO games on 18 to 24-month cycles.

I'm no game developer (duh), but 18 months sounds like a brief time to accomplish the Herculean task of creating an entire new MMO game. Then again, as the release points out, Cryptic can offer a broad set of tools and technology that should help facilitate quicker production cycles. Let's just hope all its forthcoming games don't look like they popped out of the same mold.