Champions Online, the upcoming superhero MMO from Infogrames-owned Cryptic Games, has been delayed.

While it's unclear at this point whether this is tied to the ongoing changes at Atari (read: Namco Bandai buyout of the European arm), Cryptic states that, as usual, the delay is thanks to continued improvements being made.

The release date has been pushed back from July 14th to September 1st.

“Through our constant dialogue with our vocal and supportive community of beta testers, we quickly realized that in order to implement certain features that we all considered important the development of Champions Online would require more time”, said executive producer Bill Roper.

Back in December, as it was announced that Atari parent Infogrames was acquiring Cryptic, Infogrames' CEO David Gardner noted, "This is exactly the type of company we wanted to acquire in order to build Atari for the 21st century". The Atari for the 21st Century is now, of course, looking a lot slimmer, now that it will be a US-only brand.