Today has been nothing short of a whirlwind of excitement for Atari. The first big item of note is that Phil Harrison has seen to it that his tenure as President of the company has come to an end.

It feels like it was only yesterday when he jumped ship from Sony to join Atari, but now he has stepped down from his role to become a non-executive director of the Group. A statement from the company comes via MCV, which states:

"Because of a shift of business operations to the US, Phil Harrison will move from the role of President to that of non-executive Director of the Group. As all Board members, he will continue to assist, support and guide the Company's strategy."

In the meantime, Jeff Lapin has been announced as joining Atari as COO. A former CEO of THQ and Take-Two, Lapin had been an active member of Infogrames' Board prior to the move.

And speaking of Infogrames, inattentive people won't have to worry about remembering the "r" in their name, or any of the rest of it for that matter. The company, who has recently been known as the parent company for the modern iteration of Atari, has now decided to adopt the namesake of its subsidiary.

This comes following a net loss of €226.1 million ($319.33 million) posted Friday for their fiscal year, as Gamasutra reports. As the company has worked to restructure itself, the losses increased from those of €51.1 million ($72.17 million) suffered one year ago.

However, they remain optimistic, reiterating that in the second half of the current fiscal year, they expect to be "at or above break-even," with the exclusion of non-recurring items. They have attributed the losses to "substantial write-offs and goodwill
impairments on its publishing operations as well as losses from discontinued operations due to the exit of its distribution business in Europe and Asia."

But though net losses increased, sales grew by 51 percent to €136.4 million ($192.77 million), and U.S. revenue was seen swelling by 82.3 percent to €93.9 million ($132.7 million) during the fiscal year.

Also in the course of the past fiscal year, Atari acquired City of Heroes creator Cryptic Studios, who are helping Atari to make its transition towards a more online-based revenue stream with the upcoming MMO Champions Online. In addition, they will be working on new games which utilize "Atari's existing and historically successful IPs."

The company says they are "focusing on profitable online games and owned franchises including original driving franchises, MMOs and our Atari Classic games covering the entire history of the video game industry. The Company also announced plans to reduce cost to better support the Company's strategy."

And that makes a perfect segue into MCV's report of projects which Atari is canceling in a bid to recover from its past two years of sustained losses. "As such, the Company has cancelled projects which do not meet higher return on investment criteria and require significant working capital investments," said a company statement.

However, at the present time, it remains unknown which titles are going to get the ax. Fortunately, I think Ghostbusters remains safe.