Newport Beach video game maker Shiny Studios is up for sale by struggling parent Atari Inc. of New York.
Atari plans to sell Shiny and four other video game development studios in a bid to keep the struggling publisher alive, according to industry reports.
Shiny developed “The Matrix: Path of Neo” game based on “The Matrix” movies. The game was a bright spot in an otherwise bad year for Atari in 2005.
A sale would mark the latest turn for Shiny.
David Perry started the company in the 1990s after leaving Virgin Interactive Entertainment, a now defunct Irvine game maker.
A few years later, Irvine’s Interplay Entertainment Corp. bought Shiny.
Interplay itself came to be owned by France’s Titus Interactive SA. Amid hard times, Titus sold Shiny to France’s Infogrames Entertainment SA in 2002.
In 2003, Infogrames took on the Atari name,acquired in an acquisition,in a bid to boost its profile in the U.S. Infogrames owns about half of publicly traded Atari.
Perry is stepping down as head of Shiny to oversee the sales of the business.
Along with games based on “The Matrix,” Shiny is best known for its “Earthworm Jim” games from the 1990s.
The move to sell Shiny and the other studios comes after Atari posted a third-quarter loss, saw its credit line yanked and its chief financial officer left.
Atari plans to work with outside developers instead of developing games itself, the company said.
No word on bidders for Shiny. But the game world has consolidated around just a handful of key players: Redwood City-based Electronic Arts Inc., Santa Monica’s Activision Inc., New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. and Vivendi Universal SA’s Vivendi Universal Games Inc., which owns Irvine’s Blizzard Entertainment.
Sony Corp., Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp. also are key developers of games for their video game consoles.
