Pretty much everything named ATARI fails

boing
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When I first heard about this, it struck me as so ridiculous. The “Atari” brand hasn’t meant anything for decades - it’s been sold off and passed around, often being used by multiple corporations at the same time. An “Atari” console makes no sense - the name has a fuzzy nostalgia value, but that’s it. Most of the good games on the original consoles were third party games (i.e. they can’t easily collect them), the gameplay was incredibly primitive, and all the games had their gameplay evolved by a million subsequent clones, including uncountable numbers of free web games, and continue to exist with free emulators. So there’s nothing of worth except the vague nostalgia value of some names, which would necessarily be unconnected to anything new that carried those names. It seems like they’re trying to create something between a new, overpriced, Ouya, and a Steam console alternative where you pay for the nostalgia value, but without the Steam game catalog. Given the huge failure of Ouya and the lack of success Valve have had with their console efforts, despite having the huge catalog (and some nifty hardware) to support it, this just doesn’t make sense.

I don’t think their understanding (or lack thereof) got that far. I honestly have no idea what they were thinking in this case, beyond, “We can sell any old crap, and charge for the nostalgia.”

If Atari was putting together a “classic Atari games” device (which this isn’t), it actually wouldn’t have much on it - most of the memorable “Atari” games were created by third parties and simply ported to Atari consoles, so they don’t have any rights to them. (Assuming that this “Atari” brand is the one that owns the rights to the old games…) It seems like they don’t have any real idea what this device actually is or does - besides trade on some vague nostalgia value. Which means we don’t have much of a chance trying to figure out what it is, either, really.

I kind of think that they’re counting on people making that mistake to give it some appeal, because otherwise it’s a cut-rate Steam box with no Steam…

Yeah, there’s a reason why there was a game industry crash back then - and the fact that the industry was pumping out a lot of painfully primitive games that were mostly terrible, even for the time, had a lot to do with it.

Unsurprising, really. Atari aren’t a game publisher - they license out the names of old games to indie developers and take a cut. The only reason you’d go for that terrible deal as an indie developer is that you’re hoping the slight nostalgia value of the name would contribute to sales, which only would be true if the game has nothing going for it by itself. All the recent “Atari” games have been pretty bad for this reason.

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The bright side is that eventually this will be a very rare gaming oddity which retails for slightly more than the current MSRP (but much more than you can buy it used for a year after release).

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I thought the whole premise of IndieGoGo was that it was a way to help new startups with clever ideas get off the ground, not established global brands that just happen to have crappy business models that no one wants to invest in.

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Low risk way of testing the waters. Doesn’t mean it isn’t shady.

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Low risk for Atari, sure. But the recent history of indie consoles (ie anything other than PlayStation/Nintendo/Xbox) suggests this may not be a low risk investment for the backers.

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It reminds me most of the OUYA box, which had the promise of “infinite open source gaming” with all content supplied by third parties. It was virtually useless.

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Assuming it ever gets made, I suspect it’ll get eventually sold for next-to-nothing, bought purely for the retro-kitsch case (to be used for case mods for other devices), with the guts being worthless (as it’s just going to be a low-ish powered, bog-standard PC, apparently running some flavor of Linux). And I just read that some models might just be black, so people will probably just 3D print their own versions anyways.

Yeah, although this seems like something half-way between an overpriced Ouya and a cut-rate Steam box, not really having the appeal of either (which isn’t a great starting point for a new product), it does remind me more of the Ouya (but worse). Ouya was weird - they did try to fund some games, but did a kind of half-assed job of it, turning it into a sort of contest to partially fund game development. They could never get beyond the fact that it was just a tablet set up for television screens, which demanded that game developers make new versions of their Android apps that used controllers. So it couldn’t even make use of existing Android game libraries, and that they pushed a “free-to-play” model didn’t make it any more appealing for developers - that requires a huge user base to be financially feasible, and they never had one. Atari are in an even worse position - they have no funds to convince anyone to make even minor changes to games to get them to run on whatever this will be, so what the hell will even be playable on it? Their licensing deals for the old game names are pretty bad, so if they’re hoping to fill a console with similar content, they’re completely barking mad. Are they going to try to make their version of Linux be Steam OS-compatible, so they can sell some of the less demanding games that are already available for Steam OS, but without Steam? That doesn’t sound much better, especially if they’re going to price it the same as a new Xbox/Play Station console.

Atari is weird, man. Since their heyday, the company basically went bust and randomly sold off the name - multiple times. As of a few years ago, there were at least three brand new companies using the name and they collectively had less than a dozen employees. I don’t think that’s changed. I’m surprised they’ve managed to survive the last few years, even with only a few employees, given that they have no real revenue. So it’s basically a random start-up with no money looking to make use of the one asset they have - name recognition - to sell something that no one really wants.

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Who is making the money off the IP & re-releases of the original games like Centipede and Joust?

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I met Warren shortly after he’d designed Rocky’s Boots.

(Waits for those of a certain age to come out of the faux woodwork)

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Yeah, thinking just the same.

A Pi3 with RetroPie distro on it and you are set. For a fraction of the price.
And you’re not limited to Atari 2600. There’s a list of about 50 emulated systems/consoles supported by RetroPie. And there’s even things like Kodi as an optional addon!

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I love the idea of OUYA, and if I was in a position to buy a console in 2013-2015 might well have chosen it.

It reminds me of @beschizza’s comment in the “toxic game culture” article that:

one thing that makes gamer culture so toxic is that it’s a consumer culture that thinks it’s a maker culture.

That’s the thing, I think that every culture is essentially a maker culture, where the main obstacle is an entrenched rent-seeking industry which discourages creativity. Just like how I am certain that we would have more and better movies if Hollywood was not diverting talent and hogging distribution. Projects like OUYA are an opportunity to engage the maker culture of games, and people’s reluctance was more a failure of the culture than the project itself. When people honestly believe that creativity is a waste of time without corporate pimps to answer to, it’s as if people are holding themselves and their culture hostage to the interests of consolidated capital.

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Infrogames, which also bought the (bankrupt, defunct) Interplay brand.

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From what I can tell, the rights to their back catalog (what few games they actually own - e.g. Centipede, Asteroids - Joust was actually Williams Electronics, not Atari) came with the name that’s owned by one of the current companies. With a staff of three people or so, they license the names out to developers who actually do things with them, like make/port the games. That particular Atari company is like Interplay now, who do exactly the same thing. There are probably other, similar game companies - the names of the old publishers being worn as skinsuits by holding companies that own game rights but have no resources themselves to do anything with them.

That used to be true in the game industry - to make a game, you needed expensive software, some arcane skills and a deal with a publisher who would take the game and distribute it on disks or cartridges to retailers. Those were huge barriers to entry - that are now completely gone. Anyone can pick up entirely free tools and make a game that they can distribute themselves on the internet or via various existing “storefronts” for PCs, phones and consoles. The same is more or less true for movies, too - the tools to film and edit a movie are cheap/free, and anyone can put them on Youtube or some other streaming service. The problem is, the economics just aren’t sustainable when anyone can do that; there was value in rarity caused by the gatekeeping that existed. Movie makers figured that out pretty quickly (except, perhaps, a number of Youtube “content creators”), but game developers took a while to get that - there was a huge indie game boom, but what that amounted to was people spending years building games, getting them in storefronts and then mostly discovering they couldn’t generate enough sales to pay back their life savings they spent supporting themselves making the game. (Because there were now a million indie games cluttering those storefronts, not to mention the games that didn’t even make it into those storefronts.) So without the “corporate pimp,” that leaves us with hobby development of games and movies, which tends to have very different results than if people can devote all their time and energy to the work.
The problem (well, one of) with Ouya was that they pushed a “free-to-play” approach to games that made it impossible to recover even modest development costs with their small user base. Even if one isn’t developing for a living - i.e. hobby development - one would rather target devices where you have a chance of reaching a large audience, especially if one is going to the trouble of distributing through an existing storefront with whatever arbitrary set of rules it has.

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I’m fascinated to know the development story of the AtariBox. Somehow they managed to mock up the sexiest-looking piece of consumer electronics I’ve seen in years, and despite having no funding, lousy specs, and apparently no solid plan for content or distribution yet, they’re so confident in its sexy design and the retro appeal of their logo that they think people will pay $300 for it, just to display the thing, apparently.

I can imagine this same thinking from some VC who bought the rights to the name “ColecoVision” and shows off an Apple-esque sexy-electronics video of a futuristic/retro machine at E3… THE COLECOBOX.
Crowd: “What ColecoVision games will be on it?”
VC: “We have a vision for desirable consumer content.”
“Um. So what’s it do?”
“Many… good things.”
“But what classic Coleco games will it have?”
“It will play many almost-modern PC games!”
“But… no Coleco games?”
“We’ll see!”

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I feel it’s less confidence and more desperation - someone asking, “Shit, what have we actually got that we can use to make money?” With the answer being '70s nostalgia for wood-veneer boxes and a handful of games (that aren’t, themselves, particularly worth much). But yeah, I’m wondering how they got the mock-ups put together - looking at the website, they actually built the things. They’re obviously just empty boxes, they’ve got no working prototypes, but given the tiny scale of their operation until now, I’m wondering how they even put that together - whether someone approached them with the designs, they got some small scrap of investment money, or they’ve been saving up since their (re)formation to actually hire a designer for the job…

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Of course the kinds of games and movies you can make are still dramatically limited by your resources. A lone developer could make the next “flappy bird” but no one person could make Grand Theft Auto V. A lone filmmaker could make Roger & Me or Sita Sings the Blues but it might still take nine-figure budget to make something like Avengers: Infinity War.

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Yeah, absolutely - that’s where the corporate backing/no corporate backing difference comes into play. The developers/filmmakers with resources really dominate the top-tier distribution spaces (movie theaters, stores, online storefronts, streaming services) and culture, especially since they also have marketing budgets. However, in both film and game development, though to different degrees, a small team these days can do what used to take a larger group.
What’s particularly interesting about games is that they’ve been limited by the technology - in the beginning, a single person might make a whole game, but even not so long ago, you didn’t see team sizes above 30 developers because there was only so much detail you could put in models and textures, only so much content that would fit on game disks, only so much algorithmic complexity computers could calculate in real-time. So a relatively small team can now make the equivalent of the biggest games being made X years ago. (This isn’t true of films, where as soon as they could splice together enough film to run for a few hours, they were making epics - sound and color didn’t change things that much in comparison.) So indie game development is often a bit of a time machine, in a sense. So a couple people couldn’t make GTA V (without a few centuries in which to do it), but they could make GTA I or II.

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