Atari’s crowdfunding campaign for the AtariBox (VCS) launched earlier today. [Editor’s Note: I am refusing to call it the VCS in order to avoid polluting the namespace with the original Atari VCS, launched in 1977.] With a fundraising goal of just $100k, by 10AM they had already exceeded their funding goal by almost 8x. $100,000 is barely one full-time employee salary for a project like this.
Despite the lack of detailed information about what the AtariBox is, and the loud skepticism of most of the gamer community, it seems that thousands of suckers are eagerly lining up to pre-order a videogame console that Atari don’t plan to release until mid-2019.
The announced specs for this system are more than adequate to serve as an emulation box for vintage 80’s game systems, but that’s hardly surprising, considering that emulation of the Atari 2600 has been around for at least 22 years (Stella was released in 1996, when computers were considered fast if they had 133Mhz CPU and 16 MB of RAM. The MOS 6507 CPU that drove the Atari 2600 had a 1Mhz CPU and could access up to 128 bytes of on-board RAM. That’s bytes, not kilobytes.) But as to its “modern” gaming capabilties, thehardware specs of the AtariBox is about on par with a high end gaming PC from 2006 (4GB RAM, 32GB onboard storage). The AMD Bristol Ridge CPU and Radeon R7 GPU — I would have to assume based on Atari’s form factor this will be an R7 240 — are obviously more current, but still old (AMD’s Bristol Ridge was launched in 2016, so still pretty current, but the Radeon R7 line dates from 2014, and is decidedly midrange and budget at a sub-$100 pricepoint today).
It appears that coincident with the launch of the pre-order, Atari is also, only just now, starting to work out a process for game developers to submit titles to Atari for publishing on the AtariBox platform. This gives the console a distinctly OUYA-like feel. I liked the idea of a console that was open to publishing for any indie developer, but in practice this strategy proved unsuccessful as Ouya attempted it, with hordes of low-quality shovelware published to the system by developers who weren’t yet ready for prime time.
This seems rather vague and “to be determined” for getting third-party developers on board, and they’re ALREADY taking pre-orders?
This gives me the feeling that Atari have no real clue about how to successfully launch a console in 2018.
Still, you can pre-order just the controllers, and I do kindof like the design of Atari’s contemporary take on the classic CX10/CX40 joystick. If the build quality is good, and if it will work with any PC over USB or Bluetooth, then it might be worthwhile to get one. But putting $$$ down on a pre-order and then waiting at least year for it, if they are able to launch on time, is definitely a gamble.
Beyond that, I can’t recommend pre-ordering anything. Wait for launch, and see whether Atari has any decent first-party launch titles supporting the AtariBox, and if there are any killer exclusive titles that make the console a must-own device. It seems unlikely to me — pretty much any game developer wants to maximize sales, and you do that by publishing to any and every platform that you can, not by going exclusive. Exclusive titles tend to happen only when the owner of the platform wants to pay the developer a mountain of cash to keep the title exclusive. Think Microsoft buying Bungie in order to keep Halo exclusive on the XBox. I haven’t seen any indication from Atari that they have the inclination or the deep pockets to do this.