I think you have it right. It's funny. WB owned Atari Games in the 80s and 90s, but sold it to WMS Industries in 1996 who also owned Midway, Williams, and Bally. WMS spun off their arcade division into Midway Games a couple of years later. Then in the 2000s, WB bought it back (along with all of Midway).
That’s not exactly how it worked, though Atari certainly has a long history with Warner.
Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, sold Atari to Warner Communications (the parent company of Warner Bros, along with many other companies) in 1976 in order to get the money he needed to bring the VCS/2600 to market. (They then fired him two years later.) After the video game crash, Warner sold off the home computer/console side of the business to Jack Tramiel in 1984, and in 1985 sold controlling interest in the arcade division to Namco—yeah, that Namco.
Namco ultimately decided they weren’t very interested in managing Atari’s arcade division, and sold just enough of the shares to the company’s employees for neither Warner nor Namco to have a controlling interest, which made the company effectively independent starting in 1987. Like Namco itself, Atari Games, under their Tengen license, would go on to have a lot of beef with Nintendo over the latter’s controlling policies on NES licensing.
Meanwhile, Warner Communications, still suffering some financial difficulties, ended up merging with Time (becoming everybody’s favorite oversized media giant of the 90s, Time Warner), and ended up reacquiring controlling stake in Atari Games in 1993, putting it under the control of their own fledgling video games studio, Time Warner Interactive. Time Warner continued to not have a lot of interest in managing video games, though, as a mere three years later Time Warner Interactive (including Atari Games) was sold off to WMS.
You’ve reported the rest of the story quite accurately, so no need to go into any further details. I just mourn the potential for a Primal Rage franchise, cut down in its prime by Atari’s acquisition by WMS, who shelved the sequel when they decided they didn’t need any more digitized fatality-based fighters since they already had Mortal Kombat.
They are pretty much crap. The original Rayman was good, along with AVP. I also enjoyed Power Drive Rally. All of the cd games that I have are horrible.
But, yeah, I’d probably grab it for the right price just to not use that awful controller.
Rayman is of course owned by Ubisoft, and Power Drive Rally was published by Time Warner Interactive, so presumably WB holds those rights today. AVP may be owned by Atari Interactive (the current holder of the Atari brand, and the company that keeps putting out these Atari retro things), but I imagine the Predator and Alien IPs belong to everyone’s favorite modern media overlords, Disney, now that they’ve acquired Fox, so I doubt that’ll ever get ported anywhere.
EDIT:
I seriously depressed myself fact-checking all the “who-owns-who” stuff for this post. Ugh.
