Is Photo Sauce a new direction for Atari?

Once upon a time, Atari was at the vanguard of games development. Then, for a long time, it wasn’t.

Manufacturing more copies of E.T. than there were consoles to play it on in the entire world was not their smartest move. It was the beginning of a turbulent time for Atari, and the later high-spending ways of Bruno Bonnell (after the Infogrames merger) didn’t exactly help the company either.

But under David Gardner, the company has been restructuring. It sold its European distribution business to Namco Bandai and now it has just announced its first Facebook app.

At first glance, it’s not classic Atari: no Asteroids or Centipede. Photo Sauce is an app that lets you take your own photos and, for want of a better phrase, bling them up.

Stickers, speech bubbles, images and text can be added to your pictures. Tag a friend and give them reindeer ears. OMG! Epic Fail! You Noob! Use pre-defined stickers or write your own thought bubbles. Or just recreate your favourite I Can Has Cheezburger moments.

It’s a clever way of using one of Facebook’s most popular features (over 10 billion photos uploaded) and uses the viral nature of the service really well. If someone photosauces a photo of you, you’re going to check it out, right?

It’s a very interesting move from Atari, which is on record as saying that it is moving strongly in the direction of digital distribution.

Go check it out: Photo Sauce on Facebook