Atari SA, the French holding company that gobbled up the veteran game company when it went bankrupt in 2013, announced that it is jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.

As if we do not have enough already, Atari said that it plans to release not one but two cryptocurrencies: Atari Token, which will be used for payments on digital gaming platforms, and Pong Token, which will be used for online casinos. Atari did not offer many details about how the new tokens will work, but like many other companies today, Atari seems to think that blockchain is the way to become relevant again.

“Blockchain technology is poised to take a very important place in our environment and to transform, if not revolutionize, the current economic ecosystem, especially in the areas of the video game industry and online transactions,” Atari Chief Executive Frédéric Chesnais said in a statement last week. “Given our technological strengths with the development studios, and the global reputation of the Atari brand, we have the opportunity to position ourselves attractively in this sector. Our objective is to take strategic positions with a limited cash risk, in order to optimize the assets and the Atari brand.”

Atari would not be the first game company to turn to cryptocurrencies, and there are already a few out there that have launched their own coins for in-game or in-app transactions. For example, Voxelus launched a currency last year for its virtual reality content platform, and social media company Kik Interactive Inc. announced back in May that it use its own currency to pay out its rewards program.

Whether or not Atari is relevant again, it has managed to tap into investor enthusiasm for all things crypto. Its stock has risen 60 percent since the Feb. 8 statement detailing its cryptocurrency plans. And it’s not alone. Eastman Kodak Co., another company scarcely related to its original brand, saw its share more than triple after it announced plans to offer KodakCOINs to help photographers get paid.

This is also not the first time Atari has tried to capitalize off a hot trend by relying on its name and nostalgia. After the pint-size NES Classic Edition became the must-have Christmas gift in 2016, Atari announced that it would be making its own mini retro console called Ataribox, which will also support video streaming and modern indie games. Atari expects to launch the console later this year.

After becoming a household name in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Atari’s revenue plummeted with the video game crash of 1983, around the same time the company famously buried around 700,000 unsold game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. The company somehow managed to survive the crash, but it found itself unable to compete against new rival Nintendo Co. Ltd. The company’s final console would be Atari Jaguar (pictured), which launched in 1993 and sold less than 250,000 units in its lifetime.

Photo: Philip Terry Graham/own work, CC0, Link