On April 23, Atari announced the acquisition of Implicit Conversions, an emulation studio founded in 2019 by Robin Lavallée and Jake Stine. The fee was undisclosed. The deal was covered as a fairly routine industry acquisition. It’s worth looking at it a bit more carefully than that.
Implicit Conversions is the studio behind Syrup, a proprietary emulation engine capable of handling 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit era games. Their work is probably more familiar to you than their name: over 100 classic games currently available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and through PS Plus Premium were brought to modern hardware by Implicit Conversions. That includes Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Rayman, Fear Effect, and Fighting Force. If you’ve played a classic PS1 game on a modern Sony platform recently, there’s a reasonable chance Implicit Conversions did the porting work.
Three Engines, Three Eras
The reason this acquisition matters is what Atari already owned going into it. In 2023 they acquired Digital Eclipse — the studio behind restoration compilations like the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection — for around $20 million. Digital Eclipse’s proprietary engine, Bakesale, excels at 8-bit and 16-bit material. Atari also owns Nightdive Studios, whose Kex Engine specialises in polygonal remasters of later 3D titles.
The gap between those two capabilities — the 32-bit PlayStation era — is exactly what Implicit Conversions fills. Atari CEO Wade Rosen made this explicit in the announcement, noting that Syrup’s ability to handle 32-bit material complements the existing expertise sitting across Digital Eclipse and Nightdive. The company now controls three distinct proprietary emulation technologies, covering a continuous range from early arcade titles through to PlayStation 3 era games — Implicit Conversions is also in development on Benedict, an emulator targeting PS3 hardware.
What This Probably Means
Atari’s strategy for the past few years has been reasonably legible: acquire the technical capability to port classic games from any era to modern platforms, then leverage both their own IP catalogue and licensing relationships with other rights holders to build a retro publishing operation. Rosen specifically mentioned the company’s “large portfolio of owned-IP and strong relationships with major IP holders” in his statement, and Implicit Conversions co-founder Robin Lavallée echoed the accessibility-as-preservation framing that has become the consistent language of this kind of acquisition.
Implicit Conversions and Digital Eclipse had already worked together before the acquisition — the PS1 titles in the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection were handled by Implicit Conversions within a Digital Eclipse project. That relationship now becomes internal, which presumably makes future collaborations significantly easier to arrange.
The practical upshot for players is that the catalogue of classic 32-bit era games available on current hardware — a gap that has always been awkwardly served compared to earlier generations — looks set to expand considerably. The PS1 era in particular has a long tail of games that haven’t been easily accessible for years. Whether that translates into the games you actually want is a separate question, but the infrastructure to deliver them is now in place.
The Bigger Picture
It’s worth noting that Atari in 2026 is a very different company to the one that collapsed in 1983, buried E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill, and spent several decades as little more than a brand licensing operation. The current Atari is lean, focused almost entirely on retro, and has been making consistent and sensible acquisitions. Digital Eclipse alone would have been a significant strategic asset. Three studios, three proprietary engines, and an expanding IP catalogue suggests something more deliberate is being constructed.
It’s the kind of operation that could, if it executes well, become the definitive home for classic game preservation and re-release. Whether it does depends on what they actually release, and at what price. But the building blocks are now genuinely impressive.
For more on the current state of retro gaming hardware and software, see our Is This the Golden Age of Retro Gaming Hardware?