*sigh* against my own advice I'm gonna talk about TxK...
If TxK was essentially completed anyway, couldn't they work out a licensing agreement with Atari? Surely however much Atari wanted would still be better than not releasing the game at all, right?
He tried to.
This is actually how it went:
Jeff made a game. His fans (all 5 of us) liked it.
Fred thought he could make some money from the fruits of Jeff's labour.
Jeff's game didn't actually make any money.
Fred lost all interest and scurried off back to his hole behind the couch like a good little cockroach.
You may notice that the Vita version of TxK is actually still available on PSN with no mention of Atari and no sign of it ever being removed. You may notice that Jeff never actually handed over any of his code, even though scab Atari insisted that he really, really had to (before realising there was no money in it for them).
It was never about Tempest. Scab Atari are literally a team of ambulance chasing lawyers that call themselves a game publisher. They absolutely do not give a shit about their IP, just what they can suck from it. And that breaks this old man's heart.