Shaggy the Atarian

Perhaps, them having a physical device will be an advantage over what Stadia is. Although I really doubt that the board will be fully vetted. If Rob Wyatt's thing about Atari constantly doing everything to cut corners is true (very good chance that it is, if you know anything about how they treat their software developers and pull the same thing on every release), it's going to be a dumpster fire. What interests me about Stadia's lightning fast fall, in comparing certain things about Atari SA/VCS: 1) Google and their vast resources can't get more 3rd parties on board 2) A lot of those initial feature promises didn't pan out, and because it hasn't been a success, they won't be fulfilling them (We already know of VCS features cut and scaled back; they also keep implying that certain games like Ms. Pac-Man will be on there when they won't be, since the VCS won't sell well enough to make it worth the effort/licensing) 3) Google isn't communicating with their own player base, which is always an indication that things aren't rosy behind the scenes 4) Latency issues are pretty bad (hello Antstream) I know VCSers have fallen back on the whole "well, it's just going to be a nice cheap PC" (even though the initial promise of the Ataribox had absolutely nothing to do with being a PC, but a game console), but it'll be quite the show when things don't work like they should in Sandbox mode. Especially if bricked units due to incompatible or untested hardware start happening with frequency.

I wonder how soon an article like this will pop-up about the VCS. Google Stadia adopters revolting as they realize that the "service" sucks "I'm not really excited because there simply doesn't seem to be anything to be excited about anymore." https://www.businessinsider.com/google-stadia-early-adopters-giving-up-2020-1

For anyone thinking like that, they must not understand the basics behind game development and publishing. That's what sets up a lot of expectations to be thoroughly crushed. In most cases, a publisher doesn't own the rights to the game itself, that lies with the developer. We could probably list everything that Atari designed in-house for the Lynx and Jaguar right here without it getting too long. Of course, this does not mean that Atari SA still owns these IP, as we saw with the 2019 IP holdings list a few pages back: Correct me on any of these if I'm wrong Again, this is designed at Atari back in the day, doesn't mean they haven't sold it off since, like BattleZone Lynx: Basketbrawl BattleZone 2000 Dirty Larry: Renegade Cop Kung Food Lynx Casino (hey, foreshadowing the "opportunity" Atari SA sees in Kenya!) Pinball Jam? (not sure, but it looks like it was) Robo-Squash Super Asteroids & Missile Command Warbirds World Class Fussball/Soccer Jaguar: Club Drive Hover Strike Fight For Life Missile Command 3D Tempest 2000 Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy Looking at the Atari SA IP list though, they only own the rights for two of the games on each list: Basketbrawl & Super Asteroids on the Lynx; MC3D and T2K on the Jaguar. Well, * on the Jaguar...for some weird reason, they maintain owning the very unfinished and unreleased Space War 2000. All-in-all, there really isn't much to be excited about from what they could remake or offer on their eShop from their own catalog at this point.

But it has a FUJI logo on it. How dare you not be a sycophantic Atarian that accepts everything they chuck at you without question. REAL fans know what to do.

Decades, not eons!

Don't give up hope! Perhaps Yar will finally get his revenge on it too

Atari never held the rights to PP, it was a Namco game. It only showed up in Atari cabinets due to manufacturing contracts/agreements that they put together back-in-the-day (that also applied to stuff like Dig Dug and Xevious). Often the rights were handled separately between arcades and consoles, which is why Midway did Pac-Man in arcades, Atari had it on consoles. Doing a quick check, Hyperchase was created by Jeff Corsiglia & Chris King for the Vectrex, Pole Position was developed and published by GCE.

If you mean the Atari VCS that this thread is about, then they've not announced anything in remake territory beyond what will come with the Atari Vault, while also implying that you'll be able to buy emulated copies of 2600 games through their shop system. They also have shown Tempest 4000, albeit not running on the VCS yet. If you want to know what the current Atari has under their ownership, here's a list. They have sold off a lot of their games. One example is BattleZone - that is no longer an Atari property (hasn't been since 2012). https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GTt13SyHyYCSOTUAyKCdHS0TOOthVzGT/view Atari has done some remakes in recent years, mainly on Haunted House and a bizarre attempt at Asteroids that never made it very far. I also just found out that Ninja Golf is being remade for mobile...not sure why they don't announce it for the VCS too. Night Driver also got a mobile remake. One problem with these remakes though is that they are all crap...they get terrible reviews and are forgotten about overnight. If there is such a thing as "Nintendo Magic" in keep old IP alive with fresh ideas, it's staying far away from Atari HQ. I also find it very interesting that they have not announced any of these games as coming to the VCS; no announcement of their star IP, Rollercoaster Tycoon coming to it either. Why that is, you'll have to ask them, but you'll probably get a non-answer like everyone else does (if a response even comes along). As Flojomojo pointed out, Atari SA is not the Atari of the Warner or Tramiel eras. They pay 3rd parties to make stuff or just license their IP to others instead of having an in-house development team to code things. What Atari is now is a small team of licensing people and lawyers, who don't know the first thing about making games or game consoles. Which is why this thread is full of skeptics and "haters" (I think the word "realists" is more appropriate )

Well, we're ready when you're ready As for "most arcade games," I guess it depends on how you define "most." Since you're referring to the poorly reviewed Antstream subscription service, if you mean most Data East games, then kind of. It also has some SNK titles, but nowhere close to all of them. It's a C-grade list for the most part. In looking over their games list, I recognize a lot of names myself as I'm pretty well-versed in the arcade biz, but a vast majority of the arcade titles are very obscure to every day gamers. Exceptions are there like the Double Dragon games, Rygar, two of the seven Metal Slug arcade games, BurgerTime, Heavy Barrel and Vanguard, but for the most part, Antstream is more for Commodore fans than anything else. They might improve, but overall that service is a crapshoot and for people without the knowledge of setting up an emulator : https://www.antstream.com/gameslist Sorry, nothing from Atari Games (Atari arcade titles from 1984-2001), Midway, Williams, Nintendo, Sega, Namco, Konami, Capcom & Taito, among others. Atari Vault has some pre-1984 Atari arcade versions on it at least. But part of our criticism has been that you can 1) Get all of these games on other existing platforms (and likely on devices you already own) for cheaper 2) Offering classics in their original (emulated) form isn't exactly novel anymore. It's certainly not a primary reason to spending $300~ on a new platform, at least by my view.

As Flojomojo said, they have the 2600 style, but until people get some hands-on time, it's impossible to make a final judgement on that. But, out of everything Atari has mentioned on the VCS, the joysticks have received the least amount of bashing or "hate." If you've got some other positive things to give us on the VCS, then let's hear it. Nothing is stopping you from touting it's virtues if it has any to tout.

Hey, it's tough to get through the Vegas airport with an intact wallet for some people with all of those gamblin' machines everywhere. Especially for a group as money-hungry as Atari SA is, they might take that FedEx story to heart and think "Hey, if we get lucky, we'll have this thing properly funded without a hitch!"

Behold, the hawt new business model that is guaranteed to make you billions of Zimbabwe dollars!

Any time you have a company begging for money to make something, then constantly dropping the ball with that money, you're going to have problems. The longer that goes on, the deeper the resentment gets. A pattern of bad communication over many years doesn't garner respect, it destroys it. For those that loved the Atari of the past, some find what the company has become to be an offense to the efforts and memory of what came before. Their IP trolling and lawfare behavior on many fronts rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially for those who have good memories of Atari in the past. Their behavior of how they treat their development partners is even worse, but most of that stuff isn't public (I know someone who worked on a game that they published and he said that they were one of the worst partners to work with, where Atari did everything possible to screw the development company over - which ended up hurting the players in the end, since they left the online-only game hanging in the wind). That they frequently have no clue about their own products makes them very easy to laugh at ("What's your highest score on Pong?" was perhaps the most embarrassing thing a game company has done since Giant Enemy Crabs and Riiiiidge Raacccuuurhhh - not to mention them showing typos on their own games with the VCS today. Asteroid? Really?) If it had a bunch of games coming to it that were being made specifically for the platform - not emulated titles, but reimagined classics and some new exclusive stuff, then I'd be less inclined to dump on it. To me, that would show that they are trying, not this half-assed tease-with-crumbs-once-every-several-months method. We're past the 2nd or 3rd time that they promised to have this thing out to people who paid for it, and only today has it been shown to be running in some form. Even then, that they can't simply show it being setup from start to finish with a more hands-on approach, just creates more questions, like we've seen in this thread. I don't know who does their marketing, but they are incompetent at it. It doesn't matter how big or small your team is, if you're launching a device that you've marketed as a game console, you have to give potential customers a reason to buy it, as opposed to spending $300+ on a competing entertainment device. There was a place in this thread where many users said that they wanted to see the VCS succeed, but it's Atari's own fault for bringing it to this point. How they treated negative press at The Register was the first indication that Atari is not an honest "doing our best" operation; then that snowballed into not working with developers and not announcing any sort of interesting game for the platform with it about to supposedly launch; not keeping backers/investors updated (which is supposed to be done per their end of the agreement) and constantly moving the goalposts; spinning wheels by constantly rehashing updates; losing their system architects; constantly signaling that you want someone with deep pockets to buy you out - these are not things that a company with an eye towards customer service does. Yes, they have something now, but this isn't 1977 anymore - there are many other gaming entertainment options that offer you a much better gaming experience for the money. Nostalgia gets you $3 million it seems, but an impactful game console? Not from the looks of it. That they still can't even promise to show their flagship titles on, like Rollercoaster Tycoon, raises a red flag. It's a bare-bones PC with an Atari logo on it. Now, some people are fine with that. Others find it to be a wasted opportunity, or worse, a scam - using the pretense of a new Atari game console just to get money. You might not feel it was presented that way, but to others it has been.

HOW DARE YOU FILL THE INTERNET WITH SUCH HATRED USING UNCOMFORTABLE FACTS

Here's another thing that removes the wind from the "well, they just couldn't afford a booth space!" claim - How come the official Atari Pong Table unit has their own booth space?* Why wouldn't Atari chuck in a few bucks to join them and unveil the VCS in it's glory for the whole world to see? https://twitter.com/ataripongtable/status/1215306302953525248 *Answer: Because it's being done by a different company that got the Atari license, but where they can afford it, then how come Atari, about to launch a big new product, can't?

Meanwhile, some actual cool tech to be found at CES and on the actual expo floor instead of hiding in the shadows: Notice that no one is mentioning the VCS as cool or interesting tech...or even mentioning it at all https://twitter.com/ArcadeDev/status/1215313274209652736 https://twitter.com/3rd_factory_ro/status/1214985049990291456

"Sad news is good news!"

i.e. they are summarizing this thread for us (sans tacos): There are no games to warrant a $300 price tag, the chances of anyone jumping on board the VCS to bring games that people want when all three console makers are launching more powerful hardware this year are nil, and no one in their right mind would want to buy this to do PC things with.

Nice blue TV

The 32x was a pretty dumb move on their part, because it did anger retailers and some gamers, if they hadn't passed up on what would become the N64 chipset in favor of the Saturn design, that could have caused an even longer delay for the N64 launch and given them plenty of power to compete with the PSX. But as mentioned, your hardware doesn't matter all that much if your software sucks...just like the VCS. I was shilling hard for the Jaguar back in the day, even in '98, because I wanted to see Atari return to the glory days. I saw the Telegames releases and the NUON as ways for Atari to come back. But then I realized that I was just into underdogs Overall it was pretty shortsighted of me. But did I want there to be a Jaguar 2 and see Atari dominate the gaming scene? Oh yeah. When I first heard about the VCS, I took a pause from jumping on the bandwagon, as I recalled seeing their full line of Atari branded tablets & phablets at E32015 that never came into being; Then I learned about the Gameband and looked into a variety of practices that they were doing in recent years leading up to 2017 (bashing journalists that gave their games poor scores, not really releasing anything worth writing home about, seeing a pattern of general douchbaggery where they just morphed into an IP troll, etc.). It's nice of them to finally show a menu working and getting their partners to setup untouchable displays, but as mentioned, for a system that is supposed to have already been delivered to backers and is supposedly going to be available in March, it's quite underwhelming. And hilarious that the UI they threw together is so rushed that they have glaring typos on two of their key IPs. Like has been said, if they manage to get it out to the public, there is nothing appealing about it that is going to drive sales beyond the initial 11k backer base. The current shills keep pretending like they really just wanted an Atari-like computer to use, but that's not how this whole thing started - it was supposed to be some kind of glorious return to console gaming.

But then that would prevent them from shadily touting how you can have it all thanks to Sandbox mode. Can't have anyone thinking that there are limitations! Given their level of customer service now, it's going to be a hoot watching them attempt to navigate the mine field of teaching these certain users how to get emulators working and finding Pac-Man ROMs.

"Rob Wyatt makes me want to kill tacos" is an apt phrase that is worthy of a T-Shirt in the VCS Shilling group

Slap a Fuji logo on it and it'll be the hippest thing to hit the market since SwordQuest

The Tacos win again!

Here's a Guiness World Record for most tacos served at once...this thread should be added to that achievement And by that same line, you can still get a taco, but you can't get a VCS nor the classic remake joystick. In fact, we had tacos last night for dinner, and they were great. It's too bad that some people turn the logic centers in their brains off the moment they see a Fuji logo, so onto the next disappointment in March!