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Comment by gamegod | Hacker News Reader

There's an 881 page thread of people ripping this "Atari" project to shreds on the AtariAge forums. People could smell the BS even back in 2017: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/266480-new-atari-console-t...

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.

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> There's an 881 page thread

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)

> If "Atari" felt like coming in here to clear the air, they're more than welcome to do so. There's literally nothing stopping them. What are they going to do? Swoop in here and say "just wait you guys, we've got lots of announcements planned for later this summer!" Because that's all they've done to date. Every time some nimrod falls for the "ooh look, Atari is back," this highly critical but not-so-serious thread gains a new reason for existing.

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).

> As someone who loves to find stories on "what went wrong" for startups and especially kickstarters, this is a gold mine.

Then you will love the Peachy Printer fiasco:

https://3dprint.com/133842/peachy-printer-embezzlement/

Thank you for that! This one might be my favorite:

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.

Keep in mind that the Atari of today is Infogrames, which had a reputation of being a scummy, cynical publisher...and this is after coming out of a bankruptcy turnaround as well.

Hasbro Interactive and MicroProse were super cool companies though. :/ Consolidation is the shame of this industry.

True that it is indeed the ghost of French game publisher Infogrames, although I doubt any of the original Infogrames is left. After going bankrupt in 2013 "Atari" is basically a hollow shell run by Fred Chesnais, who has zero connection to either company historically.

Totally agreed with your comments on consolidation, no good ever seems to come of it.

A couple of articles I saw suggested that what's left of Atari only has 3-10 employees.

The whole thing puzzles me in terms of the amount of time to get nowhere. I understand that marketing, arranging manufacturing and distribution logistics takes some time, but having a deliverable (pre-release) product should have been pretty darn quick, even if the BOM financials and final spec needed some work; heck, a weekend with an FPGA would have yielded something - it was done in 2010: https://hackaday.com/2010/09/15/atari-2600-recreated-in-an-f...

You're quite right. The consumer electronics development cycle is usually about 2 years with a close-to-production prototype in about 9 months.

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).

Seems accurate, lets not forget the part where they took $3m of people's money too!

Nit pick:

"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.

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