Atari isn't known for having smart people at the helm, considering they've gone under four times, even if three of those four were in name alone.

You said what i was thinking.......

Exactly.

To be fair, not being American and Infogrames being an originally European company, I don't get all the hate it gets. Sure, they made a lot of bad decisions before and after acquiring Atari, and I guess dragging the Atari brand through the mud sounds worse than if they did that while calling themselves Infogrames, but, to be honest, I can't think of an Atari game I love (maybe due to the fact I missed out on the "glorious" Atari consoles, for sure -- my first video game console was an Intellivision, followed by an NES), whereas Infogrames gave me Alone In The Dark and some of my all-time favourite SNES games (Lucky Luke comes to mind). I'm not happy with the way they are treating the Rollercoaster Tycoon franchise, the same way I'm not happy with the way they are treating a whole lot of other franchises of studios they bought (RCT was a Hasbro Interactive title, now fully owned by Atari/Infogrames), but I don't think it's fair to blame Infogrames for things that are Atari's fault. Atari had their time to shine and they were almost single-handedly responsible for the video game crash of the 80's, if anything, Infogrames saved them from being just a brand from a bygone era.

Sorry for the vent, but it sounds really unfair to me when people start praising Atari and blaming it all on Infogrames. Yes, Infogrames' behaviour, policies and business decisions have been less than good, but it's not like Atari was any better in their day. I grew up playing a lot of Infogrames published/developed titles and it's sad when people forget the impact they had in the industry just because they're not as well-known as "good old" Atari.

[EDIT] By the way, since we're having this discussion on a gog.com forum, and gog.com is part of CD Projekt Group, let's not forget most of CDP's success comes from sales and critical acclaim of The Witcher, a game which was possible because Atari trusted CDPRED enough to publish it, when other companies perhaps didn't.