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Atari CEO Confirms the Company Is Working On a New Game Console (venturebeat.com)
Dean Takahashi, reporting for VentureBeat: Atari CEO Fred Chesnais told GamesBeat in an exclusive interview that his fabled video game company is working on a new game console. In doing so, the New York company might be cashing in on the popularity of retro games and Nintendo's NES Classic Edition, which turned out to be surprisingly popular for providing a method to easily play old games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda in HD on a TV. Last week, Atari began teasing a new product called the Ataribox. The video released on a non-Atari web site showed a picture of some kind of hardware product, but many people wondered if the teaser was fake. Others had no idea what the video was showing about a "brand new Atari product years in the making."
If it's just another Emulator with pre-loaded ROMs, not interesting.
If they made a fully programmable console with ports for removable media - even if it was just emulating the 2600 - that's a little more interesting
A catchy tune more about the ZX Spectrum, but still: https://youtu.be/Ts96J7HhO28
Imagine a modern console platform anybody could cut software for without all the fuckery. Spicy
It's been passed around every since, and anyone claiming to be them now just bought the name from someone who bought it from someone, etc.
I worked at Accolade when Infogrames went on a buying spree prior to the dot com bust. After they bought Accolade, they bought Hasbro Interactive that also owned the Atari intellectual property rights. It wasn't a coincidence that headquarters got moved from San Jose to Sunnyvale, home for the original Atari, and the company renamed itself to Atari. I believe that Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple personality disorders) is still behind the current Atari after the most recent bankruptcy. Whenever I wear an Atari t-shirt out in public, I still run into people who worked at the original Atari.
There's no reason for people to buy your game console.
Sony and Nintendo can sell consoles because they have a library of 1st party IPs, first class game publishing operations, and an extensive number of highly talented game creators. Microsoft is struggling because they haven't maintained this part of their business very well and they had a bad console launch.
Atari has none of this. No one will make games for your console. You can't write the billions of dollars of checks Microsoft wrote to get into the business. It's not going to happen. (Unless it's a tiny, cheap emulator box with games included, like the NES Classic.)