{"id":101489,"date":"2019-10-08T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-08T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2019\/10\/ataris_attempt_to_relaunch_the_vcs_has_just_hit_another_brick_wall"},"modified":"2019-10-08T16:30:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-08T16:30:00","slug":"ataris-attempt-to-relaunch-the-vcs-has-just-hit-another-brick-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/10\/08\/ataris-attempt-to-relaunch-the-vcs-has-just-hit-another-brick-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"Atari&#8217;s Attempt To Relaunch The VCS Has Just Hit Another Brick Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/1e5c8cd5cb0e6\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/1e5c8cd5cb0e6\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<figure class=\"picture strip\"><a title=\"Atari VCS\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/1e5c8cd5cb0e6\/atari-vcs.original.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/1e5c8cd5cb0e6\/atari-vcs.900x.jpg\" alt=\"Atari VCS\"><\/a><\/figure>\n<p>Atari was once the king of video games, and at one point was close to working with Nintendo to bring its Famicom system to the west. Those days are a long time ago now, and the company exists only in name \u2013 a name which has been passed around from owner to owner, its importance diminishing with each sale.<\/p>\n<p>However, the announcement of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2019\/06\/ataris_take_on_the_classic_edition_trend_will_cost_you_at_least_usd250\">$250 Ataribox<\/a> \u2013 a console which promised a return to the good old days of the VCS \/ 2600 \u2013 gave Atari&#8217;s long-suffering (and presumably very old) fans something to smile about. Then the horror stories started rolling in \u2013 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/06\/atari_comes_under_fire_for_seemingly_knowing_very_little_about_its_crowdfunded_vcs_console\">the company having little idea about the tech inside the machine being perhaps the most worrying example.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Fast forward to the present, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2017\/07\/ataris_new_console_seems_to_be_part_nes_classic_mini_part_ouya\">Atari VCS<\/a> (yes, they&#8217;re calling it the same name as the iconic original) has missed its (second) proposed launched date of June 2019. A revised release date for the crowdfunded console is March 2020. However, even that date has been thrown into doubt by the announcement that Atari&#8217;s system architect, Rob Wyatt, has walked away from the whole project after payments were missed.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to <a class=\"external\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2019\/10\/08\/atari_architect_quits\/\">The Register<\/a>, Wyatt \u2013 who has been involved with the system via his consultancy, Tin Giant \u2013 said:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>As of Friday, October 4th, I have officially resigned as the architect of the Atari VCS. Atari haven&#8217;t paid invoices going back over six months. As a small company, we have been lucky to survive this long. I was hoping to see the project through to the end and that it wouldn&#8217;t come to this, but I have little choice other than to pursue other opportunities.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Can Atari complete this system without Wyatt&#8217;s help? That remains to be seen, but Atari \u2013 which raised over $3m (\u00a32.4m) via crowdfunding to start work on the console \u2013 is hardly in ideal shape to weather such a storm; it has made a loss of \u20ac2.5m ($2.75m) in each of the past two years, based on revenue of \u20ac20.6m ($22.6m) and \u20ac18m ($19.8m) respectively.<\/p>\n<p>The whole situation is turning into something of a crapshoot, and it&#8217;s painfully obvious now \u2013 if it wasn&#8217;t at the start \u2013 that Atari will <em>not<\/em> be reclaiming its place in the video game hardware industry any time soon. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft clearly have little to worry about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Atari was once the king of video games, and at one point was close to working with Nintendo to bring its Famicom system to the west. Those days are a long time ago now, and the company exists only in name \u2013 a name which has been passed around from owner to owner, its importance [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}