Matt_B

It's worth remembering that Jeff's preceding games had been shareware titles like Llamatron and the remake of Revenge of the Mutant Camels. The idea that he'd got a flagship game for a new console in him wouldn't have been on anyone's radar at the time.

You're not a grown ass man unless you hand raised a donkey from birth. 🙂

Let's just say that it wasn't Galaxy Purple.

I did one earlier but it might have failed the emissions test.

Mathieson did eventually go on to lead the Nvidia Tegra team though, so he eventually figured it out.

The consensus seems to be that the newer APUs in other handheld PCs are only getting much of a performance bump if you throw a lot more power at them. You can get twice the performance but the price is half the battery life and a bunch of overheating issues. The new Steam Deck should still be quite competitive in watt-for-watt terms, and you should actually get a full two hours of out it unthrottled now. Mainly though, the screen is no longer the thing that's holding it back.

Earlier this year we also learned that Resident Evil 4 had been broken for nearly two decades, until Capcom finally fixed it. 🙂

That game is doing to physics what the Catholic Church did to Galileo.

There are also Epyx games on the C64 and A500 Minis. Some of their C64 games were even on the Wii eShop for a while. All in all, there's been a lot of licensing activity over the years. They're definitely not something that's just been sat on and forgotten.

I'd think that it would work the opposite way. That is, the more people understood about blockchains and NFTs, the more the mundanity of what they truly are would serve to reduce interest in them. At the end of the day, a blockchain is basically just a database and cryptocoins and NFTs are record sets in a database. Whether that database is distributed or centralized is going to be neither here nor there in most applications, and you certainly shouldn't need a distributed database just to track the membership status of people with regards to a single company.

You've got to love the timing with this coming out at almost the exact same time that Sam Bankman-Fried got found guilty on all charges. Atari might not be trying to rob people blind, but the sheen has definitely worn of blockchains in the past year or so. They are emphatically not associated with a shiny future, but a seedy present and their unecessary inclusion here just drags down what would otherwise be a desirable piece of merch for some of their biggest fans.

They're doing Berzerk: Recharged, so that's something. Realistically though, at the rate of a handful of games per year, most of their acquisitions aren't going to get remade. I'd like to see the M Network games get the Atari 50 treatment though and, along with the games they picked up from Stern and ones that were left out, that should have the makings of another 100 game compilation or DLC package.

Yeah, they've already got the most relevant part of Intellivision in the form of M Network. I suppose if the rest of the IP were going for a song in a bankruptcy auction, Atari might put in a bit for it. That seems to be how they picked up the games from Ronimo, at any rate. I just don't see them wanting to take on a company that's known to be millions of dollars in debt and with no meaningful product, and literally nobody is going to bankroll the Amico back to life at this point.

Does that mean he can credit himself as an "Art Director"?

In all honesty, I don't think Atari need to own Epyx. They're as much of a big deal across a whole bunch of other platforms as Atari and the current owners are doing a good job of supporting that. There are a bunch of Epyx games on the C64 and A500 Minis, for instance, as well as all the ones on Steam. They just need to reach a deal with the rights holders that'd let them license the relevant games for Atari 50 volume 2/DLC/whatever. Also, don't stop at the Lynx. Get the A8 and ST games, as well the ones for the other Atari consoles. There are way more of those.

I jest of course, but clearly there's still much work to do before Atari are back in the black and their share price reverses its slide. It's interesting to note how Digital Eclipse still have access to the $10+ million that they raised on Republic without those people having a say in this, so it's like a $3.5 million instant win for Atari! Crowdfunding clearly isn't investment, just in case anyone was in any doubt about that.

I believe it's $4 million in cash plus $2.5 million in Atari shares, and up to $13.5 million based on profitability. So... basically $4 million all up.😄

Whether it's as DLC or a separate release, doesn't particularly bother me. We know that they're sitting on at least a hundred more games from the ones that were in Vault, plus the acquisitions from M Network and Stern. For some more flagship titles, they could do a deal with Activision. Such things have happened in the past to get the games on Flashback consoles so it shouldn't be impossible, even if acquiring them outright would be beyond Atari's current means.

Does this mean that a second volume of Atari 50 is confirmed? 😄

There's a part of me that wonders what would have happened if Tommy had got to Wade Rosen before Fred Chensais did, and persuaded him to bankroll the Amico rather than the VCS. I don't think it'd be a story that would end well.

I'm fully expecting them to trot out the "but they're unplayable without the controller" excuse for the missing games. Meanwhile, we're expected to believe that a twitchy arcade game like Astrosmash is going to be fine using an emulated controller on a mobile phone over a Wi-Fi network. More generally, Amico Home just doesn't seem to have a reason to exist beyond people who want to roll their own console as a vanity project. If they just wanted to bring the games to Android, it'd seem far more sensible to release them directly via Google Play.

They'd be a familiar name to aficionados of the Wii and Wii U eShops - where the Swords & Soldiers games were originally exclusive - as well as the Humble Bundle, to which they contributed several times. Calling them "indie darlings" might be going a bit far but their games always reviewed well. At least they did until Blightbound, the bug ridden mess that I presume was their undoing.

I don't think they'll be getting any developers as part of this deal. They're just buying IP out of a bankruptcy auction. Still, get the Awesomenauts servers back up, throw a big Steam sale, and it'll probably pay for itself in no time.

Yes, it might seem odd in that they've no associations with Atari and aren't old enough to be considered retro, but Ronimo went bankrupt in August, so everything would have been auctioned off at bargain basement prices. Their last game, Blightbound, kinda bombed, so I guess they just ran out of cash. The Awesomenauts servers were shut down soon afterwards too, so maybe Wade just wants to get them back up again so he can get a match. 🙂 Much though we'd like to see them pick up the likes of the Atari Games catalogue, the Activision games for the 2600 or Battlezone, I'd suspect that those would come with a much higher price tag.