I was looking into the Atari logo last night, because I wanted to transfer it to the back of an old laptop that I've recently acquired to run my vinyl cutter. I used the one from Wikipedia's article on Atari Inc. After I applied it, I realised that it's not right. On close inspection, the sides of the logo are the wrong shape and not even symmetrical. Additionally, the T and the I are the wrong height and don't line up with the other letters at the top (the top of the T looks a bit skinny as well).
This start sent me down a rabbit hole of Atari logos.
The dodgy logo on Wikipedia:
I discovered that the original logo was drawn by a man named George Opperman in 1972 (his name was Fred Opperman according to Al Alcorn who was there at the time, but I think he must have misremembered).
This is Opperman's logo design:
This logo appears to have lasted virtually unchanged until Atari Corporation came along. Then we see a considerable edit of the logo shape.
This image is a scan from the cover of the manual of Neochrome:
The logo graphic is virtually the same as Opperman's design, but I have only seen use of this logo in this horizontal format, while prior to 1984 the vertically-stacked logo with graphic above and stylised ATARI text below seems to have been the officially-sanctioned one. The shape of the R in the word ATARI has also been changed from Opperman's version in this logo variant.
This is a variation of the "classic" Atari logo that I see all over the internet:
I believe this one is an unofficial logo where someone has attempted to redraw and improve the original. That being said, it's common to see this one used by Atari fans all over the net. The curve of the graphic has been changed so that the flat part of the hockey sticks at the top is longer, and the stylised ATARI text has been changed from left-aligned with the graphic to being slightly further left than the graphic. This is because it actually looks more centred to the human eye due to the A having a weird centre of gravity. That's a pretty common approach used by graphic designers in my current line of work (web design) as well. If you look back up at the first two logos I posted, you'll probably now see them both as having slightly off-centre text.
When Hasbro bought Atari Corporation, they changed the logo to this monstrosity (along with the name to Atari Interactive):
Probably the main reason I don't like this one very much is that it came at a time when I didn't at all connect with what Atari Interactive were doing. But I do think that the original logo wasn't broken and didn't need fixing.
Summarily, a couple of other variations of Atari logos followed that, like the last one, look quite amateurish to my eyes.
I can see that they were experimenting with the look of it. Flaring the base of the vertical element in the graphic didn't make it look better IMO.
Then we have another Atari iphone app logo which seems to have been collected by LogoBlink.com in 2011:
What's notable about that one is that the stylised ATARI text has been moved considerably to the left in order to line up the middle of the logo with the central letter A in ATARI. This helps make it look centred, although whoever it was might have gone overboard a bit.
For my label-cutting adventures, I created this hybrid logo which is my preferred version at this moment. It consists of the 1972 Atari logo graphic, combined with the Atari Corporation version of the stylised ATARI text, resized to slightly extend out at the left to appear more centred.
Do you guys know of any more variations on the classic Atari logo? Which one do you like the best and why?
The Atari Logo
Moderator: troed
Re: The Atari Logo
Thanks for the writeup. Very interesting.
Principal ASIC Engineer - SystemVerilog, VHDL
Thalion Webshrine - http://thalion.atari.org
STf,STfm,STe,MegaST,MegaSTe,Falcon060
A500+,A600,A4000/060,CD32,CDTV
Thalion Webshrine - http://thalion.atari.org
STf,STfm,STe,MegaST,MegaSTe,Falcon060
A500+,A600,A4000/060,CD32,CDTV
Re: The Atari Logo
Replace the one on Wikipedia with yours, mentioning that it's asymmetrical etc ...
Re: The Atari Logo
I make you new logo, free of charge, best of all times:
Re: The Atari Logo
Maybe Hasbro touched the logo, but at least they kept the concept of the volvano with the magma tube in the center instead of Infogrames reinventing the whole concept as a "road going toward the horizon".