Atari Hotels | Hacker News Reader

Atari Hotels

atarihotels.com

Atari is basically just a brand at this point that's been passed around to companies that don't know what to do with it. Their current incarnation is known for this aborted hotel idea (they couldn't secure funding), speaker hats, a poorly selling Linux based console called the VCS, and a crypto token.

The VCS was a good idea IMO. It just needed a few more hardware/software iterations.

I wonder if the Steam Deck is more or less that.

I have no idea what this is...

after reading most of the text i'm also unsure if it's a real hotel or something metaversish.

It's a freaking hotel. Link from their media page: https://atarihotels.com/news/atari-announces-world-class-vid...

Seems they forgot to pay their hosting provider:

   This Account has been suspended.
   [Contact your hosting provider](webmaster@atarihotels.com) for more information.

It is rather odd that the "hosting provider" link leads to webmaster@atarihotels.com - is this a web hotel instead of a brick-and-mortar one?

If you’re never going to go there anyways, what’s the difference?

I'm guessing it's intentionally confusing to garner attention. It's for sure a VR space (spaces?) but they talk about "Restaurants and lounges that stimulate the senses."

The only sense the restaurant will stimulate is sight and sound ofc, and zero people want to sit in a VR restaurant - but it's good marketing to put people through the ringer I suppose.

I expect this to have the profitability and longevity of a Pyongyang mega hotel.

Now it all makes sense https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/5/8/15582580/atari-blade-...

It's rather pathetic that the article tells more about the venture than the website.

If you can't design a website, how do you design a hotel?

Needs less Blade Runner and more Pong:

https://arcadeblogger.com/2022/12/04/what-if-ataris-pong-was...

I expected to at least find out where the hotels are?

"The first of the Atari Hotels is planned to break ground in 2020 in Phoenix, AZ"

So, nowhere.

Atari's branding is so epic and timeless, it'd be a shame to abandon it in the dustbin of the past. Glad they're doing something with it.

TBH, a dignified retirement would have been much better than a bunch of shady business clowns desparately slapping the Atari logo on everything they can get their hands on (and of course they also dabbled in crypto and NTFs: https://www.atarichain.com/, https://atari.com/blogs/newsroom/atari%C2%AE-reveals-50-year...). Thanks, but no thanks.

PS: this Atari Hotels stuff has been around for years. Did they actually start building one, or is it still just a 'vision' to milk investors?

Reading Token Whitepapers is always a ride, but this one, oh dear...

> Atari is going to cover this opportunity, as our first use case is a crypto-casino, offering players the possibility to gamble with crypto-currencies.

Didn't even try to hide it.

> Our industry has become more and more decentralized. A game development project might have its animation created in one place, game environments in another one, music in Canada, core development in Montréal or Los Angeles, and testing in India.

Montréal, in opposition to Canada.

> One of the best examples that comes to my mind is the 2012 experiment by the One Laptop Per Child (OPLC) organization. OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing tablets to illiterate children in Ethiopian villages, leaving no instructions.

I can't believe these savages managed to turn a tablet on! Yuck.

> The value proposition of the Atari Token is to be the crypto-currency of reference for these blockchain-based platforms, otherwise known as “smart platforms”.

Essentially, they could've taken a pitch for any other ERC-20 token and stripped out their unique selling point. They don't even sell it on "brand recognition". It's just "wow look at all that economic freedom and theoretical (unnamed) uses of smart contracts".

The hot mess: https://atarichain.com/documents/atari-white-paper.pdf

Atari steaks! Atari Ice Water! Atari University! (Actually that one sounds pretty cool. A retro gaming programming school would probably do pretty well these days.)

Doesn't look like there's any updates in the past 9 months, assuming it's vaporware

I honestly expected "have you stayed Atari today?" to feature prominently.

Account suspended...

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