Phil Harrison, former main man at Sony Computer Entertainment, was hired as the president of Infogrames to transform the company and shape the direction of Atari. The future of Atari is taking a new path, perhaps into a more casual “social gaming” online style future.

In a Q&A session with Mr. Harrison, he talks about Alone in the Dark being, perhaps, one of their last huge-budget video game efforts. Although Alone in the Dark is an Infogrames title, the parent company of Atari, it does mold the direction of Atari.

Although their are plenty of titles in the pipeline for Harrison’s company, Atari will adjust its business model to meet the demands of the industry. Moving towards a community concept and packaged more into an online business (downloadable games perhaps?) and less like the shrink wrapped boxed games we’re all used to buying from Atari.

The industry transition is going “online” and Harrison says, “If we are part of that transition, perhaps we are going to take a slightly aggressive, leading-edge role in that transition.” This may be a bright future for the Atari branding which has never shined as bright as they once did in 1982, just before the video game crash of ’83.

Although Harrison never directly states “casual games” he mentions shying away from big budget video games and focusing more on social aspects to online gaming. This means an online presents with a community aspect which doesn’t cost a large amount of cash which cancels any chance of an MMO, a move that would surely seal Atari’s fate along with its parent company Infogrames.

Looking at other industry movements, like Instant Action, from GarageGames, its clear there is an effort to move towards flash based gaming with complete network interaction and community focus. As bandwidth increases, online activities rise and gamers continue to look for cheaper alternatives for entertainment we’ll see sites like this continue to expand.

A site like Instant Action isn’t exactly a standard “game portal” which aggregates titles from many developers, but focuses on their own proprietary games and markets them as their own. We’ve seen Valve’s Steam thrive in an online presence with hit titles and partnerships with folks like PopCap (Peggle) for highly cherished downloadable content for a reasonable price.

Boxing and shrink wrapping a game costs money, marketing materials, manuals and competition leads to excessively high costs for game titles. A company like Atari, who has struggled financially, can benefit from a less-costly game development cycle much like any Indy company can.

What do they really have to lose