Atari VCS Lead Architect Quits, Claims Six Months of Design Work Went Unpaid
hothardware.com
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At some point in that thread around summer 2019, a photo of their "prototype" hardware was released, and it's just a stock embedded Ryzen dev board - not custom hardware at all. After 2 years, they had nothing done. It gets even better: They realized their original case design from 2017 was too costly and had to redesign it in Spring 2019: https://medium.com/@atarivcs/atari-vcs-structural-improvemen...
Even in 2019, all they had were renders of both their old and new case designs, and that blog post really goes to show how unprepared they were. Any moron with CAD experience could have told them their original design would have been a nightmare to manufacture/assemble.
Holy shit. As someone who loves to find stories on "what went wrong" for startups and especially kickstarters, this is a gold mine. Especially because it 100% independent from Atari's censorship. Here's a comment I just found on page 750:
> I'm not sure what you're adding to the discourse, but I think this thread is a healthy alternative to:
Self-serving, highly censored comments on the IndieGoGo project page (managed by "Atari")
Self-serving, highly censored comments in the Facebook discussion thread (managed by "Atari")
Self-serving, highly censored comments in the Instagram feed (managed by "Atari")
Self-serving Twitter threads (managed by "Atari")
Self-serving puff pieces on Fox Business News for audiences from hosts who don't care to audiences who care even less
More independent, but constrained by relentless positivity, Atari VCS Reddit group (managed by @Historian but infected with Dubs syndrome, and occasionally visited by "Atari," who doesn't have anything to say)
It's mostly just a bunch of guys joking around about it, but it's actually interesting (having looked at maybe 1% of the content).
Then you will love the Peachy Printer fiasco:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/2559/the-weird-wild-saga-of-gi...
It reads like a Hollywood script that would be rejected for being too unbelievable.
This whole Atari VCS project feels like someone having a punt with a "this seems like a good idea" moment and seeing how far it could go as a side project. (my dramatic characterization of the situation).
Hasbro Interactive and MicroProse were super cool companies though. :/ Consolidation is the shame of this industry.
Totally agreed with your comments on consolidation, no good ever seems to come of it.
"Any moron with CAD experience" is why you get things that look good or meet the printed requirements but are impossible to manufacture and assemble.
> Arzt says that Atari is targeting two groups, with one being the folks over 35-years-old who remember playing the console and playing Atari games in the arcade. The other group is the younger crowd that Arzt says see Atari as more of a cool old brand and want modern capabilities like Streaming video services such as Hulu and Netflix. Arzt says that the Atari VCS is less expensive than a PC and eliminates the need to connect a laptop to the TV.
Who the hell is going to pay $300 for a glorified emulator slash Chromecast?
Considering the 2nd group likely already has a $30-50 Netflix device and the first group has had plenty of options to emulate old Atari (and every other system’s) games for years.
Not a big fan of this Hollywood approach to branding. A retro brand doesn’t make your product interesting, at most it’s a foot in the door.
For some, I think it's just a matter of acquiring and hoarding stuff, especially from particular brands. Consumerism.
"But... hello, you! I'm GuruLarry, and I welcome you to Fact Hunt: Five new console flops from old brands."
https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+typewriter+stores
If those stores can stay afloat, there's a decent chance this Atari could sell. (Assuming it's actually built).
For a reason that might make sense, but which I rarely see repeated: standardized “first-party” products allow a level playing field for speedruns and the like. Whereas nobody’s gonna trust a run you did on your modded toaster.
A more likely reason, though, is that quite frequently now collectors are also content-creators (gamer YouTubers, etc.) and these folks need officially sanctioned games and consoles for the same reason professional artists need official copies of Photoshop: you’re way more likely to get sued as a business profiting off of piracy than as an individual just playing.
Then there's Christmas. My partner happily bought me a Nes Mini for Christmas, I don't think she would have been so happy to get me a raspi, controllers, case, possibly install emulators, roms, etc.
Its like building your own PC, most people on HN could probably do that no problems, the majority of the population would prefer to get a Dell.
NES controllers especially are great for kids, for whom even SNES controllers are confusing with their four face buttons plus two shoulders—and I remember, as an NES kid who didn't get another console until I bought myself a PS2 in college, finding anything with more buttons than a 3-button Sega Genesis controller kinda tricky at first, though I eventually managed well enough to hold my own on some N64 games at friends' houses. Only "complicated" controller I've found to be almost as usable for my young kids is the Gamecube controller, so they got that right after all I guess.
Sure you can get knock-offs, but Nintendo doesn't screw around with controller quality, even on cheapish emulator systems.
[EDIT] also I've owned two Wii-connector-to-USB adapters, both from Mayflash, and both were janky and soon stopped working at all, so just buying the controllers (or just using the Wii Classic Pro controller, which is what I actually attempted those times) hasn't given me acceptable reliability.
I could see the appeal of them maybe designing the VCS as a SteamOS box in a cool woodgrain retro-styled case, even I'd be tempted. Stick an officially-endorsed emulator and ROMs on there and you're well away. But this talk of their own proprietary gaming platform? What developer in their right mind would want to develop games for such a small market?
If they'd actually positioned it as a low cost SteamOS box which can run a decent amount of PC games for cheaper than most PCs, they might have at least have a niche market for it. If they some integration with SteamOS to launch an Atari emulator and they'd have some extra selling point. But it's basically just a small low-powered Linux PC that might get a few exclusive deals.
So there would seem to be at least some demand, though I share your general skepticism — nothing crowdfunds quite as well as nostalgia, particularly geek nostalgia. And this thing is leaning on the nostalgia angle hard.
The Indiegogo minimum which (seems to) include a base system was only $100, which makes sense for a legit branded emulator + a little more features on top.
Otherwise it's entering semi-luxury collectible to full-fledged competition with current gaming systems entering in their late phase and sub $300 range on Craigslist/EBGames.
This feels like a decent idea faced with feature-bloat and/or early & unrealistic technical requirements. The website is encouraging people to make their own Atari starter-games for kids or whatnot, which then makes it's not only an emulator console but a whole modernized platform w/ an SDK + all the Chromecast browser/etc crap that will probably be rushed at the end.
I thought about the same, and ended up reading a few articles on it. Then I went to the website [1] and found the price - $389!!!! No chance, despite me being target market (48, original Atari 2600 owner (still have it in my loft), still moaning about how great the games were in the old days to the kids as I get them off my lawn, etc).
[1] - https://atarivcs.com/
Unless you've got money to throw around and not enough time to truly invest, but aint that always the truth.
I have a Linux PC hooked up to a TV in the living room for exactly these purposes (video/streaming and light gaming), thrown together from old parts and a bit of a mess to use. So a £300 device that does the same thing holds some appeal, even moreso if it had a developer behind it pushing some games on the platform, and making a good software experience. But it's not that, it's basically the same as that clunky PC I have in the living room running Linux, capable of playing games if you launch Steam or streaming whatever works in a browser.
I'm not their target audience though, and if I was then it'd be a pretty narrow niche to target.
It's amazing how much you can get away with when you have a recognised brand. They've combined the worst of over optimistic/under prepared kickstarters, with the worst of big corporation penny pinching. And yet just because people know the name Atari, they got millions of dollars in pre-orders, and even got Walmart and Best Buy to sell their (non-existent) device.
Edit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui... is another article I read about this which I was basing some of my comments on - they apparently are planning on just releasing it running a generic Linux distro without any sort of console UI/ games launcher, and without any particular support for streaming platforms aside from a web browser.
In my opinion, technical companies should not have managers or executives (who don't simultaneously hold technical roles). They are just parasites without skills who inappropriately have power over the skilled people under them.
This is just one of many examples of that.
It’s probably past time for crowdfunding vaporware to die.
Most games are very playable because they were designed to be good to play, not to be flashy for Twitch and VC money.
The best part is that the games that you couldn't afford to buy back when they were new are $3 used, or $0 emulated. So you can play anything you want.
But the ones I play most often are the ones with good gameplay: Dig Dug, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tron, Air Sea Battle, Moon Patrol, Jungle Hunt.
I play on real hardware. There's a place in Pittsburgh called DK Oldies that sells refurbed 2600's online with a 90-day warranty.
I have one of those Retron77 machines, too, but it doesn't work with all games. Most notably, paddle games. Which is a shame because I really like Circus Atari.
* Qbert
* Pac-Man / Ms Pac-Man (I mean, the gameplay on that is a classic)
* Battlezone
* Centipede / Millipede
tbh mostly the arcade conversions (with exception of Battlezone)
That all said, I do definitely agree with your point that the vast majority of 2600 games don't hold up well compared to stuff released a few years later. And in the case of the arcade conversions, there's definitely better versions of those games on other system -- playing them on the Atari is really more because "I can" rather than because "they compare better". Even so, I do still really enjoy playing on it.
I wonder if this comes from our interactions with large companies. We go in, we see a bunch of products that we are not the customer for, and then we pick one and buy it. We ignore the rest, but for each product, somewhere out there is another customer who will buy it.
But when we hire someone, we want something custom. There is no other market for the options we reject. They are dancing solely for our amusement. Whether we or amused or not, we are taking up their time.
The fact it took a decent portion of my 30-odd years on the earth to hear it, despite taking a number of economics classes, means it's also not a common way it's expressed - which in turn means the above - that "time" is a part of what you're paying for - doesn't really come into most thinking.
How do you add value to something? Either through human labour, or raw material inputs, and I would guess many raw materials gain their value entirely from the human labour put in to extracting them.
If you buy an iphone, you are paying someone to mine the raw material, refine it, make it in to chips, make it into a phone, box it, ship it, then paying some marketers to tell you why you need it.
Yes the tiny amounts of gold, and rare earth elements have value, 99% of an iPhones value comes from people's time.
Of course I agree with the intuitive appeal in the understanding, hence why I called it outmoded. There are better understandings which explain more of the nature of money.
Namely the Labour Theory of Money ignores the vast importance of assets (capital). You'll notice the similarities to our system of economy "Capitalism". This makes sense when you consider it was Karl Marc, proponent of Labour Theory of Value, who coined the term "Capitalism".
Thus the Labour Theory of Value breaks down when introducing the idea that things (capital) can also contribute value. We buy tractors for our farms and in fact look for ways to reduce the labour costs of making this!
Now in 2019 it is easy to imagine a robotic machine which mines the resources it requires and produces a widget. Yet none of us would be surprised if the robot demanded more than 0$ despite the lack of human time invested in each widget.
If I work for you for an hour and get paid, I can either use that to pay for something else, or save it. If I save it, that's capital. I can use that capital to pay someone to build a machine, that machine multiplies my productivity, lowering costs for you, whilst I still get higher pay.
You seem to implicitly accept this "We buy tractors for our farms and in fact look for ways to reduce the labour costs of making this!"
Now, as a model, it becomes less useful as you become more and more divorced from that original labour, so I'm not surprised that economists and central banks are moving away from it, but in the context of whether to buy an Atari emulator, or build one, it's more than adequate.
Yes, there is some human labor in assembling and maintaining the machine, but I consider it largely divorced from human labor.
A computer server turns data into more-useful data, either by aggregating it, storing it in a convenient way, or routing it. Once set up, the computer can run for years without human intervention. Very little human labor there after initial setup, but value was added.
I agree that as you add layers of machines, you get more divorced from the original labour, I was going to say that labour provides the lower bound, maybe my prior paragraph shows that isn't true, of course there are costs to those 2 activities, they just aren't borne directly by us.
As I put in a sibling comment, it's a model, not suited to everything, but suited to evaluating buying v building an Atari emulator.
[1] I suppose you could argue that computers add lots of value, but competition has reduced the price down to approximately the labour cost. I'm probably not using strictly economics terms here.
Basically I can see why people might want something more official than an rPi if it's done well and by original company. But Atari thing is not that.
I blame the journalists covering this stuff. There was so many PR release articles touting this thing based on renders... nobody looked into the people who were responsible on executing it.
These guys have no skills in building a gaming console. They bought a brand and scammed people out of 3M+.
On the other hand, the @tGames Atari Flashback 8 is fun to play with, though I do use wired controllers, not the wireless ones!