Buying Atari would be a waste of money. They have basically no big IPs at this point (except Dragon Ball, which you could get by waiting for the company to die and then bidding on it) and the Atari name is kind of bleh these days. The fact that someone had to go look up what games they've done just goes to prove it.

It could be okay as a label to publish Xbox Arcade games or something, like someone suggested, but I don't see it as being of any use to the first parties. Even Microsoft arguably has a better reputation for videogames these days. Certainly Nintendo would have no use for this name. It would just be an extra, confusing brand to throw around.

Basically, the only situation where buying the Atari name would be worthwhile is for a company that has no reputaiton of its own.

Nintendo has a ton of cash laying around. Maybe they'll bail them out/Buy them out.

But why? There's just no good reason other than nostalgia for a name that already failed once and got bought out by another company only to start failing again.

They could use them to make games. Like when they have Sega make Star Fox, and hudson to do Mario Party.

Infogrames was renamed to Atari in 2003 after they purchased 51.2 percent of Atari, Inc. Since then the Atari curse has been stripping it of all their cash reserves and market cap.
Infogrames was great at making games (they had an uber cool armadillo as their logo), with franchises such as Test Drive, Alone In The Dark, Sid Meier's Games (Civilization, Pirates etc..) , Chris Sawyer's Games (Railroad Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon etc..), Driver, Stuntman, Unreal and Developers like Shiny, Accolade and Gremlin.
However the Curse of Atari was too great for them and it eventually forced them to sell of their ip's like Stuntman to THQ and developers Reflections + Driver IP Interactive to Ubisoft, Shiny to foundation 9. With Sony publishing games by Quadratic Realms (Indigo Prophecy) they lost yet another qualified developer. Ubisoft is developing/publishing the next Naruto game on the Xbox 360.

Atari seems to be losing barrels of money developing almost very few games. They need to tighten their belt and drop the Atari to get rid of the curse :-p