For the past four-and-a-half years, Wade Rosen has been leading gaming's most famous super-old-school company as Chief Executive Officer. Atari has done all sorts of fun stuff in that time, including the excellent (and ongoing) Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.

Maybe I've been living under a rock regarding Rosen, but up until today, I had no idea we shared such similar tastes. The Atari CEO has chimed in with a trio of his dream remaster projects, and man, while they're all fairly unlikely, I'd snag Collector's Editions for each and every one of 'em.

Balancing Act

I've got to tell you, I'm finding myself respecting Rosen's earnestness and honesty in this new interview with VGC. It's worth a read, but for the moment, I'll go ahead and highlight something rad: in an ideal world, Wade Rosen would find a way to release remasters of Yasumi Matsuno's Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, Hideo Kojima's Snatcher, and Yukio Futatsugi's Panzer Dragoon Saga.

All three are incredible video games. The original Ogre Battle was developed by Quest Corporation in 1993, and it kickstarted an excellent series that's been dormant for far too long (except for 2022's Tactics Ogre: Reborn, itself a remaster). Snatcher is a 1988 Konami cult-classic inspired by Blade Runner, Akira, The Terminator, and (naturally), Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As for Panzer Dragoon Saga, it's just a darn good 1998 Sega Saturn JRPG that far too few people have played.

"If we ever had a chance to work on Panzer Dragoon Saga or Ogre Battle or Snatcher or something like that…" -Wade Rosen

"I mean, I don't know if it would do well, but I'd probably push it through and make sure we did it just because I would love to work on one of those," Rosen continued. "But it all has to be in a balance. If this company just became, like, 'what games does Wade want to work on?' We would not be around too long." So, there's the rub. Atari is, as I think we all know, a company. Companies - again, I think we're all aware of this one - need to make money. Yet, I'm sure I am not alone in saying that Rosen has fine taste in which games to do despite the bottom line.

“Where you can, the end goal is always to try and do something that is both something we genuinely have a lot of passion about and has a lot of commercial viability,” the CEO carried on, before mentioning Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection as a stellar example of an upcoming Atari-published project which fits the bill to a tee. Odds are solid that Legacy Kollection will make a mint, and while I'm a bigger JRPG and visual novel fan, I can't deny that it'll probably do far better than any of those three aforementioned classics.

"If you go too far in any one direction – if you’re only numbers-driven, it crushes the spirit of the company. If you’re only passion-driven, well, you oftentimes don’t have a company."

Regardless, I think that the above quote is my favourite of all in an interview that, as I mentioned earlier, is well worth diving into. Would that more companies recognized that a purely numbers-driven approach is a terrible thing.