> Arzt says that Atari is targeting two groups, with one being the folks over 35-years-old who remember playing the console and playing Atari games in the arcade. The other group is the younger crowd that Arzt says see Atari as more of a cool old brand and want modern capabilities like Streaming video services such as Hulu and Netflix. Arzt says that the Atari VCS is less expensive than a PC and eliminates the need to connect a laptop to the TV.
Who the hell is going to pay $300 for a glorified emulator slash Chromecast?
Considering the 2nd group likely already has a $30-50 Netflix device and the first group has had plenty of options to emulate old Atari (and every other system’s) games for years.
Not a big fan of this Hollywood approach to branding. A retro brand doesn’t make your product interesting, at most it’s a foot in the door.
I share your view here, but must admit I've been surprised by people in various chat rooms expressing excitement and enthusiasm about this piece of hardware.
For some, I think it's just a matter of acquiring and hoarding stuff, especially from particular brands. Consumerism.
I could see it selling for the same reason things like the snes classic do. Nostalgia goggles combined with a dislike of, I guess, unofficial emulation, for whatever reasons that don't make much sense to me. Either that or for the slightly more interesting things people do with these things like hacking and modding them. For me though, retroarch seems to have 99% of everything I'd ever want to emulate covered so...meh.
> a dislike of, I guess, unofficial emulation, for whatever reasons that don't make much sense to me.
For a reason that might make sense, but which I rarely see repeated: standardized “first-party” products allow a level playing field for speedruns and the like. Whereas nobody’s gonna trust a run you did on your modded toaster.
A more likely reason, though, is that quite frequently now collectors are also content-creators (gamer YouTubers, etc.) and these folks need officially sanctioned games and consoles for the same reason professional artists need official copies of Photoshop: you’re way more likely to get sued as a business profiting off of piracy than as an individual just playing.
What about people not wanting to pirate? However small, I'm sure the demographic is bigger than the content creator demographic.
Then there's Christmas. My partner happily bought me a Nes Mini for Christmas, I don't think she would have been so happy to get me a raspi, controllers, case, possibly install emulators, roms, etc.
Its like building your own PC, most people on HN could probably do that no problems, the majority of the population would prefer to get a Dell.
The controllers, mostly, for me. Which Just Work and don't decide to become unmapped for no damn reason (admittedly less common on Retroarch/Lakka systems than others, though). I mean those things are legit. About as close to the originals as you could hope, and I've side-by-sided them. Only real loss on the NES are the four-score games (Super Spike V'Ball and World Cup Soccer are both actually good and are actually good with four players!) and light gun games, of which I love two but would only really defend one as even sort-of worth a damn (Duck Hunt). Still don't get why that wasn't on the Wii. SNES classic, on the other hand, is damn near perfect. After you hakchi all your other games on, in both cases, obviously.
NES controllers especially are great for kids, for whom even SNES controllers are confusing with their four face buttons plus two shoulders—and I remember, as an NES kid who didn't get another console until I bought myself a PS2 in college, finding anything with more buttons than a 3-button Sega Genesis controller kinda tricky at first, though I eventually managed well enough to hold my own on some N64 games at friends' houses. Only "complicated" controller I've found to be almost as usable for my young kids is the Gamecube controller, so they got that right after all I guess.
Sure you can get knock-offs, but Nintendo doesn't screw around with controller quality, even on cheapish emulator systems.
[EDIT] also I've owned two Wii-connector-to-USB adapters, both from Mayflash, and both were janky and soon stopped working at all, so just buying the controllers (or just using the Wii Classic Pro controller, which is what I actually attempted those times) hasn't given me acceptable reliability.
The Atari Flashback consoles already exist for this reason, the last one even had HDMI and upscaling built in as well as the ability to run ROMs from an SD card. You don't need a Ryzen processor to run old Atari games.
I could see the appeal of them maybe designing the VCS as a SteamOS box in a cool woodgrain retro-styled case, even I'd be tempted. Stick an officially-endorsed emulator and ROMs on there and you're well away. But this talk of their own proprietary gaming platform? What developer in their right mind would want to develop games for such a small market?
It essentially is just a Steam box. It's all Linux based, and they're supposedly not building any sort of console UI or launcher for it. Install Steam, launch big picture mode, and it's basically the same as any other SteamOS box.
If they'd actually positioned it as a low cost SteamOS box which can run a decent amount of PC games for cheaper than most PCs, they might have at least have a niche market for it. If they some integration with SteamOS to launch an Atari emulator and they'd have some extra selling point. But it's basically just a small low-powered Linux PC that might get a few exclusive deals.
So there would seem to be at least some demand, though I share your general skepticism — nothing crowdfunds quite as well as nostalgia, particularly geek nostalgia. And this thing is leaning on the nostalgia angle hard.
Get the price to $100, or at least sub $200, and I'll consider it interesting.
The Indiegogo minimum which (seems to) include a base system was only $100, which makes sense for a legit branded emulator + a little more features on top.
Otherwise it's entering semi-luxury collectible to full-fledged competition with current gaming systems entering in their late phase and sub $300 range on Craigslist/EBGames.
This feels like a decent idea faced with feature-bloat and/or early & unrealistic technical requirements. The website is encouraging people to make their own Atari starter-games for kids or whatnot, which then makes it's not only an emulator console but a whole modernized platform w/ an SDK + all the Chromecast browser/etc crap that will probably be rushed at the end.
>Get the price to $100, or at least sub $200, and I'll consider it interesting.
I thought about the same, and ended up reading a few articles on it. Then I went to the website [1] and found the price - $389!!!! No chance, despite me being target market (48, original Atari 2600 owner (still have it in my loft), still moaning about how great the games were in the old days to the kids as I get them off my lawn, etc).
If you're nostalgic about something that's readily within your reach, I find it hard to not just do it. Pretty sure emulators exist and a dedicated fan can easily port this to one of the hundreds of raspberry pi gaming rigs I've seen people post all the time.
Unless you've got money to throw around and not enough time to truly invest, but aint that always the truth.
A cool looking box around a Pi-like device would already be great. A pair of solid joysticks that look like the 2600 ones (could even be pin compatible - it only need 5 IO pins each) would seal the deal.
The price is a bit high, and it now seems there was nothing behind the smoke and mirrors, but I would consider this if it weren't vapor to be similar to a chromebox in a cuter case. Without this news, the development time was puzzling and off-putting; I just don't see how it was supposed to take so long to put together a system with off the shelf x86 hardware and put together a software suite.
As a small form factor PC capable of playing some games, it's a pretty good value offering. But that's only really appealing to tinkerers and hobbyists who want to set these things up to their liking.
I have a Linux PC hooked up to a TV in the living room for exactly these purposes (video/streaming and light gaming), thrown together from old parts and a bit of a mess to use. So a £300 device that does the same thing holds some appeal, even moreso if it had a developer behind it pushing some games on the platform, and making a good software experience. But it's not that, it's basically the same as that clunky PC I have in the living room running Linux, capable of playing games if you launch Steam or streaming whatever works in a browser.
I'm not their target audience though, and if I was then it'd be a pretty narrow niche to target.
It's amazing how much you can get away with when you have a recognised brand. They've combined the worst of over optimistic/under prepared kickstarters, with the worst of big corporation penny pinching. And yet just because people know the name Atari, they got millions of dollars in pre-orders, and even got Walmart and Best Buy to sell their (non-existent) device.
Edit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui... is another article I read about this which I was basing some of my comments on - they apparently are planning on just releasing it running a generic Linux distro without any sort of console UI/ games launcher, and without any particular support for streaming platforms aside from a web browser.
I bought it because I maintain a collection of misfit computing projects that never had a chance. It'll look great between my Virtual Boy and Atari Jaguar.
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.
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).
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).
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.
I’m not sure the situation here, but I’ve always wondered why the disconnect is so big between creative work and what people will pay. You ask someone to do a bunch of work, and then people feel justified in only wanting to pay for the bit they are going to use (or not pay at all if they don’t want it).
I wonder if this comes from our interactions with large companies. We go in, we see a bunch of products that we are not the customer for, and then we pick one and buy it. We ignore the rest, but for each product, somewhere out there is another customer who will buy it.
But when we hire someone, we want something custom. There is no other market for the options we reject. They are dancing solely for our amusement. Whether we or amused or not, we are taking up their time.
Also I don't think most people consider what portion "time" was of the purchase price. You think about buying gas or eating out and it's the price of "gas" or "eating takeout" that costs a lot of money. Everyone is aware there are a lot of people employed by those industries but their time isn't what usually comes to mind. Take this logic to an extreme case like custom creative work and you're bound to have a clash of mentality with reality and that is bound to go far when most don't understand why exactly it takes so much time to end up with the piece you were going to use.
"Money is deferred human labor" was something a commentator here posted in a cryptocurrency thread, and it's the best possible explanation I think I've ever heard for what money really "is".
The fact it took a decent portion of my 30-odd years on the earth to hear it, despite taking a number of economics classes, means it's also not a common way it's expressed - which in turn means the above - that "time" is a part of what you're paying for - doesn't really come into most thinking.
I'm not sure we can say it is out moded yet, the recent paradigm of fiat currency backed by nothing has only existed since 1971 when the US got off the gold standard. For all of human history before that time money was tied to something solid and therefore a direct measure of a persons time/production/deferred future value.
How do you add value to something? Either through human labour, or raw material inputs, and I would guess many raw materials gain their value entirely from the human labour put in to extracting them.
If you buy an iphone, you are paying someone to mine the raw material, refine it, make it in to chips, make it into a phone, box it, ship it, then paying some marketers to tell you why you need it.
Yes the tiny amounts of gold, and rare earth elements have value, 99% of an iPhones value comes from people's time.
Of course I agree with the intuitive appeal in the understanding, hence why I called it outmoded. There are better understandings which explain more of the nature of money.
Namely the Labour Theory of Money ignores the vast importance of assets (capital). You'll notice the similarities to our system of economy "Capitalism". This makes sense when you consider it was Karl Marc, proponent of Labour Theory of Value, who coined the term "Capitalism".
Thus the Labour Theory of Value breaks down when introducing the idea that things (capital) can also contribute value. We buy tractors for our farms and in fact look for ways to reduce the labour costs of making this!
Now in 2019 it is easy to imagine a robotic machine which mines the resources it requires and produces a widget. Yet none of us would be surprised if the robot demanded more than 0$ despite the lack of human time invested in each widget.
I didn't ignore capital, it just circles back round to "Money is deferred human labor".
If I work for you for an hour and get paid, I can either use that to pay for something else, or save it. If I save it, that's capital. I can use that capital to pay someone to build a machine, that machine multiplies my productivity, lowering costs for you, whilst I still get higher pay.
You seem to implicitly accept this
"We buy tractors for our farms and in fact look for ways to reduce the labour costs of making this!"
Now, as a model, it becomes less useful as you become more and more divorced from that original labour, so I'm not surprised that economists and central banks are moving away from it, but in the context of whether to buy an Atari emulator, or build one, it's more than adequate.
A machine running and converting raw material into finished product (say, injection-molded plastic, or a part-picker-placer organizing or soldering on a PCB) rapidly turns less-valuable-stuff into more-valuable-stuff. Value added.
Yes, there is some human labor in assembling and maintaining the machine, but I consider it largely divorced from human labor.
A computer server turns data into more-useful data, either by aggregating it, storing it in a convenient way, or routing it. Once set up, the computer can run for years without human intervention. Very little human labor there after initial setup, but value was added.
To return to your computer server example though, these things require so little labour add so little value[1], that they're very nearly / actually are free. A google search is free, posting a message to HN is free.
I agree that as you add layers of machines, you get more divorced from the original labour, I was going to say that labour provides the lower bound, maybe my prior paragraph shows that isn't true, of course there are costs to those 2 activities, they just aren't borne directly by us.
As I put in a sibling comment, it's a model, not suited to everything, but suited to evaluating buying v building an Atari emulator.
[1] I suppose you could argue that computers add lots of value, but competition has reduced the price down to approximately the labour cost. I'm probably not using strictly economics terms here.
This is the first I’m hearing of the Atari VCS. As someone that lived through the original Atari era I don’t think most of the games would hold up for much replay ability at all. They were fun because they were all we had. They were very crude. Pitfall was one of the best and I can’t imagine myself playing that for more than a few minutes. Commodore 64 games on the other hand would still be quite fun today.
My wife bought me six carts earlier this week. I play for a few hours at least every other week.
Most games are very playable because they were designed to be good to play, not to be flashy for Twitch and VC money.
The best part is that the games that you couldn't afford to buy back when they were new are $3 used, or $0 emulated. So you can play anything you want.
I gravitate toward the really old ones for nostalgia's sake. The ones with the text-only labels.
But the ones I play most often are the ones with good gameplay: Dig Dug, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tron, Air Sea Battle, Moon Patrol, Jungle Hunt.
I play on real hardware. There's a place in Pittsburgh called DK Oldies that sells refurbed 2600's online with a 90-day warranty.
I have one of those Retron77 machines, too, but it doesn't work with all games. Most notably, paddle games. Which is a shame because I really like Circus Atari.
I still have the original hardware hooked up. There's a few games that definitely hold my interest:
* Qbert
* Pac-Man / Ms Pac-Man (I mean, the gameplay on that is a classic)
* Battlezone
* Centipede / Millipede
tbh mostly the arcade conversions (with exception of Battlezone)
That all said, I do definitely agree with your point that the vast majority of 2600 games don't hold up well compared to stuff released a few years later. And in the case of the arcade conversions, there's definitely better versions of those games on other system -- playing them on the Atari is really more because "I can" rather than because "they compare better". Even so, I do still really enjoy playing on it.
This is something like the fourth or fifth unrelated company with the Atari name, but at least the previous ones actually made games. This one just looks like the Infinium Phantom redux.
If they aren't paying one of lead developers for this amount of time then management is basically stealing from the people doing the actual work.
In my opinion, technical companies should not have managers or executives (who don't simultaneously hold technical roles). They are just parasites without skills who inappropriately have power over the skilled people under them.
Looks like I dodged a bullet as I was close to pulling the trigger on backing the Indiegogo campaign. This proves to me that when it comes to semi-expensive hardware, it’s best to wait for some version of the product to actually exist before committing any funds. I already made that mistake backing the Airing CPAP which has yet to deliver 5.5 years after the campaign with one excuse after another. Fool me once?
It’s probably past time for crowdfunding vaporware to die.
I blame the journalists covering this stuff. There was so many PR release articles touting this thing based on renders... nobody looked into the people who were responsible on executing it.
These guys have no skills in building a gaming console. They bought a brand and scammed people out of 3M+.
I kind of understand the want for the mini NES/SNES/PSX or any consoles with relatively unique controllers. You can get a rPi and a decent arcade stick for less than $100. What's the appeal of this? I believe archive.org hosts every MAME ROM, it's not like you'd even need to visit a less than reputable site to put this all together.
I wouldn't lump this in with the recent mini NES or SNES. Nintendo has a loyal fan base and a proven track record. They made something simple and well built for fans of their IP. Atari isn't even a thing anymore. Someone bought the name and attempted to cash in on it. They used crowdfunding and scammed consumers out fo 3M+ dollars.
Basically I can see why people might want something more official than an rPi if it's done well and by original company. But Atari thing is not that.
Atari definitely isn't the same caliber as Nintendo/Sony, but I think it's the same market which is why they were able to get $3M in funding. All the other mini remakes sold gangbusters from what I recall.
Isn't six months of unpaid dev work about par for the course for Atari? Fight for Life, the Jaguar itself, and more. And my memory says Infogrames wasn't too swift either.
Why did anyone sign onto this expecting that to have changed in 30 years?
On the other hand, the @tGames Atari Flashback 8 is fun to play with, though I do use wired controllers, not the wireless ones!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread> Arzt says that Atari is targeting two groups, with one being the folks over 35-years-old who remember playing the console and playing Atari games in the arcade. The other group is the younger crowd that Arzt says see Atari as more of a cool old brand and want modern capabilities like Streaming video services such as Hulu and Netflix. Arzt says that the Atari VCS is less expensive than a PC and eliminates the need to connect a laptop to the TV.
Who the hell is going to pay $300 for a glorified emulator slash Chromecast?
Considering the 2nd group likely already has a $30-50 Netflix device and the first group has had plenty of options to emulate old Atari (and every other system’s) games for years.
Not a big fan of this Hollywood approach to branding. A retro brand doesn’t make your product interesting, at most it’s a foot in the door.
For some, I think it's just a matter of acquiring and hoarding stuff, especially from particular brands. Consumerism.
"But... hello, you! I'm GuruLarry, and I welcome you to Fact Hunt: Five new console flops from old brands."
https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+typewriter+stores
If those stores can stay afloat, there's a decent chance this Atari could sell. (Assuming it's actually built).
For a reason that might make sense, but which I rarely see repeated: standardized “first-party” products allow a level playing field for speedruns and the like. Whereas nobody’s gonna trust a run you did on your modded toaster.
A more likely reason, though, is that quite frequently now collectors are also content-creators (gamer YouTubers, etc.) and these folks need officially sanctioned games and consoles for the same reason professional artists need official copies of Photoshop: you’re way more likely to get sued as a business profiting off of piracy than as an individual just playing.
Then there's Christmas. My partner happily bought me a Nes Mini for Christmas, I don't think she would have been so happy to get me a raspi, controllers, case, possibly install emulators, roms, etc.
Its like building your own PC, most people on HN could probably do that no problems, the majority of the population would prefer to get a Dell.
NES controllers especially are great for kids, for whom even SNES controllers are confusing with their four face buttons plus two shoulders—and I remember, as an NES kid who didn't get another console until I bought myself a PS2 in college, finding anything with more buttons than a 3-button Sega Genesis controller kinda tricky at first, though I eventually managed well enough to hold my own on some N64 games at friends' houses. Only "complicated" controller I've found to be almost as usable for my young kids is the Gamecube controller, so they got that right after all I guess.
Sure you can get knock-offs, but Nintendo doesn't screw around with controller quality, even on cheapish emulator systems.
[EDIT] also I've owned two Wii-connector-to-USB adapters, both from Mayflash, and both were janky and soon stopped working at all, so just buying the controllers (or just using the Wii Classic Pro controller, which is what I actually attempted those times) hasn't given me acceptable reliability.
I could see the appeal of them maybe designing the VCS as a SteamOS box in a cool woodgrain retro-styled case, even I'd be tempted. Stick an officially-endorsed emulator and ROMs on there and you're well away. But this talk of their own proprietary gaming platform? What developer in their right mind would want to develop games for such a small market?
If they'd actually positioned it as a low cost SteamOS box which can run a decent amount of PC games for cheaper than most PCs, they might have at least have a niche market for it. If they some integration with SteamOS to launch an Atari emulator and they'd have some extra selling point. But it's basically just a small low-powered Linux PC that might get a few exclusive deals.
So there would seem to be at least some demand, though I share your general skepticism — nothing crowdfunds quite as well as nostalgia, particularly geek nostalgia. And this thing is leaning on the nostalgia angle hard.
The Indiegogo minimum which (seems to) include a base system was only $100, which makes sense for a legit branded emulator + a little more features on top.
Otherwise it's entering semi-luxury collectible to full-fledged competition with current gaming systems entering in their late phase and sub $300 range on Craigslist/EBGames.
This feels like a decent idea faced with feature-bloat and/or early & unrealistic technical requirements. The website is encouraging people to make their own Atari starter-games for kids or whatnot, which then makes it's not only an emulator console but a whole modernized platform w/ an SDK + all the Chromecast browser/etc crap that will probably be rushed at the end.
I thought about the same, and ended up reading a few articles on it. Then I went to the website [1] and found the price - $389!!!! No chance, despite me being target market (48, original Atari 2600 owner (still have it in my loft), still moaning about how great the games were in the old days to the kids as I get them off my lawn, etc).
[1] - https://atarivcs.com/
Unless you've got money to throw around and not enough time to truly invest, but aint that always the truth.
I have a Linux PC hooked up to a TV in the living room for exactly these purposes (video/streaming and light gaming), thrown together from old parts and a bit of a mess to use. So a £300 device that does the same thing holds some appeal, even moreso if it had a developer behind it pushing some games on the platform, and making a good software experience. But it's not that, it's basically the same as that clunky PC I have in the living room running Linux, capable of playing games if you launch Steam or streaming whatever works in a browser.
I'm not their target audience though, and if I was then it'd be a pretty narrow niche to target.
It's amazing how much you can get away with when you have a recognised brand. They've combined the worst of over optimistic/under prepared kickstarters, with the worst of big corporation penny pinching. And yet just because people know the name Atari, they got millions of dollars in pre-orders, and even got Walmart and Best Buy to sell their (non-existent) device.
Edit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui... is another article I read about this which I was basing some of my comments on - they apparently are planning on just releasing it running a generic Linux distro without any sort of console UI/ games launcher, and without any particular support for streaming platforms aside from a web browser.
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.
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:
> 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).
Then you will love the Peachy Printer fiasco:
https://3dprint.com/133842/peachy-printer-embezzlement/
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.
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).
Hasbro Interactive and MicroProse were super cool companies though. :/ Consolidation is the shame of this industry.
Totally agreed with your comments on consolidation, no good ever seems to come of it.
"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.
I wonder if this comes from our interactions with large companies. We go in, we see a bunch of products that we are not the customer for, and then we pick one and buy it. We ignore the rest, but for each product, somewhere out there is another customer who will buy it.
But when we hire someone, we want something custom. There is no other market for the options we reject. They are dancing solely for our amusement. Whether we or amused or not, we are taking up their time.
The fact it took a decent portion of my 30-odd years on the earth to hear it, despite taking a number of economics classes, means it's also not a common way it's expressed - which in turn means the above - that "time" is a part of what you're paying for - doesn't really come into most thinking.
How do you add value to something? Either through human labour, or raw material inputs, and I would guess many raw materials gain their value entirely from the human labour put in to extracting them.
If you buy an iphone, you are paying someone to mine the raw material, refine it, make it in to chips, make it into a phone, box it, ship it, then paying some marketers to tell you why you need it.
Yes the tiny amounts of gold, and rare earth elements have value, 99% of an iPhones value comes from people's time.
Of course I agree with the intuitive appeal in the understanding, hence why I called it outmoded. There are better understandings which explain more of the nature of money.
Namely the Labour Theory of Money ignores the vast importance of assets (capital). You'll notice the similarities to our system of economy "Capitalism". This makes sense when you consider it was Karl Marc, proponent of Labour Theory of Value, who coined the term "Capitalism".
Thus the Labour Theory of Value breaks down when introducing the idea that things (capital) can also contribute value. We buy tractors for our farms and in fact look for ways to reduce the labour costs of making this!
Now in 2019 it is easy to imagine a robotic machine which mines the resources it requires and produces a widget. Yet none of us would be surprised if the robot demanded more than 0$ despite the lack of human time invested in each widget.
If I work for you for an hour and get paid, I can either use that to pay for something else, or save it. If I save it, that's capital. I can use that capital to pay someone to build a machine, that machine multiplies my productivity, lowering costs for you, whilst I still get higher pay.
You seem to implicitly accept this "We buy tractors for our farms and in fact look for ways to reduce the labour costs of making this!"
Now, as a model, it becomes less useful as you become more and more divorced from that original labour, so I'm not surprised that economists and central banks are moving away from it, but in the context of whether to buy an Atari emulator, or build one, it's more than adequate.
Yes, there is some human labor in assembling and maintaining the machine, but I consider it largely divorced from human labor.
A computer server turns data into more-useful data, either by aggregating it, storing it in a convenient way, or routing it. Once set up, the computer can run for years without human intervention. Very little human labor there after initial setup, but value was added.
I agree that as you add layers of machines, you get more divorced from the original labour, I was going to say that labour provides the lower bound, maybe my prior paragraph shows that isn't true, of course there are costs to those 2 activities, they just aren't borne directly by us.
As I put in a sibling comment, it's a model, not suited to everything, but suited to evaluating buying v building an Atari emulator.
[1] I suppose you could argue that computers add lots of value, but competition has reduced the price down to approximately the labour cost. I'm probably not using strictly economics terms here.
Most games are very playable because they were designed to be good to play, not to be flashy for Twitch and VC money.
The best part is that the games that you couldn't afford to buy back when they were new are $3 used, or $0 emulated. So you can play anything you want.
But the ones I play most often are the ones with good gameplay: Dig Dug, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tron, Air Sea Battle, Moon Patrol, Jungle Hunt.
I play on real hardware. There's a place in Pittsburgh called DK Oldies that sells refurbed 2600's online with a 90-day warranty.
I have one of those Retron77 machines, too, but it doesn't work with all games. Most notably, paddle games. Which is a shame because I really like Circus Atari.
* Qbert
* Pac-Man / Ms Pac-Man (I mean, the gameplay on that is a classic)
* Battlezone
* Centipede / Millipede
tbh mostly the arcade conversions (with exception of Battlezone)
That all said, I do definitely agree with your point that the vast majority of 2600 games don't hold up well compared to stuff released a few years later. And in the case of the arcade conversions, there's definitely better versions of those games on other system -- playing them on the Atari is really more because "I can" rather than because "they compare better". Even so, I do still really enjoy playing on it.
In my opinion, technical companies should not have managers or executives (who don't simultaneously hold technical roles). They are just parasites without skills who inappropriately have power over the skilled people under them.
This is just one of many examples of that.
It’s probably past time for crowdfunding vaporware to die.
I blame the journalists covering this stuff. There was so many PR release articles touting this thing based on renders... nobody looked into the people who were responsible on executing it.
These guys have no skills in building a gaming console. They bought a brand and scammed people out of 3M+.
Basically I can see why people might want something more official than an rPi if it's done well and by original company. But Atari thing is not that.
On the other hand, the @tGames Atari Flashback 8 is fun to play with, though I do use wired controllers, not the wireless ones!