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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."
It's a couple paragraphs speculating a 22 second video clip of nothing. Do a google image search for the Atari Logo and you will be just as well informed.
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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
Nintendo's NES Classic Edition, which turned out to be surprisingly popular
Big difference: NES games were an order of magnitude better than Atari 2600 games.
Launching a 2600 emulator in a box will be a huge flop. Most of the games were shovelware if we're honest.
No sig today...
Based on your username I expect that you're of the same generation I am, and that the original Nintendo Entertainment System came out right about the time you were old enough to pay attention to video games.
For this generation an Atari 2600 would feel like a step backward, but for those who are only a few years older it might be just what they want, as it was the mainstream system when they were old enough to get into video games. In short, if it emulates the 2600 and even the 5200 or 7800 it would be aimed at children of the seventies more than children of the eighties.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You can always get the Atari Flashback 7 Classic Game Console. I would be much interested in an Atari 5200/7800 retro console, two generations I skipped because I had a Commodore 64.
Atari (home console company) died when they were reverse-taken over by JTStorage, a hard drive manufacturer, after the Jaguar failed. A whole three Atari employees joined the company (I think one of them did Jaguar technical support for a few more years). Even that tenuous link was broken when JTStorage when out of business and sold the Atari name to someone else. 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.
The arcade games half of Atari split off and followed it's own path to being a slightly-valuable trademark.
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.)
Wasn't Pacman, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong jr, Mario bros., and galaga all on atari also.The atari came out in the 70s and the nes in the 80s so the games look much better on nes but they were still a lot of the same games.
When you had to put down $5,000 - $6,000 for a PC that could play the games available at the time as opposed to $200-300 on a console that had a larger library and arguably better graphics until EGA/VGA started becoming a thing... PC gaming didn't make sense. It was when Doom came out that the landscape really started to change towards PC's favor.
He's talking about the era before graphic accelerators like the 3dfx.
Look at games before VGA, before sound cards. At best, you had EGA graphics and Tandy/PCjr audio running on 12~20MHz CPUs that had to do all the graphics one pixel at a time. But those games also had to support 8MHz CPUs, 4-colours CGA graphics and a PC speaker only capable of generating one programmable square wave frequency without any volume control.
That's what he's talking about.
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get an Atari 8-bit computer. They're the same computer (with a few tweaks to the registers so Atari could try and control who released cartridges). Or an XEGS, which is a consolized Atari 800.
The 7800's a weird beast. You have to be careful you don't break the cartridge prongs off in it like I did when I was a kid (there's two prongs that it uses to connect a 7800 cart to the extra pins that let it be a 7800 cart). Otherwise you've just turned it into a 2600 until you pull it apart. The controllers suck, but IIRC you can use Genesis controllers. The games are kinda strange. Mostly arcade ports. The NES arcade ports are generally better though. But Pole Position II is superb and since it was the pack in cheap. Then there's Ball Blazer & Ninja Golf.
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For me, the game has to be one I played when growing up. Then the nostalgia can overcome any shortcomings or unfair comparisons to today's games.
Wasn't Pacman, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong jr, Mario bros., and galaga all on atari also.The atari came out in the 70s and the nes in the 80s so the games look much better on nes but they were still a lot of the same games.
They had the same names on the boxes but they weren't comparable on screen. Not even close.
No sig today...
If they had any sense, they'd just make an Atari-branded Steam Machine.
Sometimes I think Valve today is the closest thing that exists to the old Atari in its heyday, since they are bridging the gap between consoles and "home computers". Rather than try to compete with that, Atari should partner with them.