Atari Calls out The Register and The Register Fires Back

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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The Register published an article about the AtariVCS. They had some things to say about it, that were a bit less than nice, kind of like these statements.

There's only one problem: it doesn't work. And by "not work" we don't mean it crashed or is having teething troubles, we mean it literally does not work.

Then they went on to ask a series of questions, that quite frankly they got less than informed answers to, from Atari's CEO Michael Arzt.

What happens if we plug this into our laptop, we ask Mike. I don't know, he says. Will it work? I don't know. If we plug it into a different games machine, will it work? No. So it's custom hardware and software? I don't know about that.

Atari fired back and basically said that the vultures over at The Reg were full of crap on Facebook.

We honestly can't explain that article either. Our executives sat with that reporter for half an hour and he wrote what he wanted instead of what was discussed with him. Sadly there are even irresponsible trolls in 'professional' positions I guess.

We clearly said that we were bringing engineering design models to GDC and lots of people clearly don't understand what that means. Hunks of plastic? Well, yeah, that's how you finalize the designs and confirm that you can get the look and feel you want for the finished products. Sad.

The Register decided to release a full audio recording of the meeting and let you decide for yourself, which party is actually full of BS. I am the only one getting a "50 Shades of Infinium Labs" feeling?
 
Dang!! Makes me sad. I had the original. Still do, in the attic somewhere. I know the games are fried, system probably does not work either.
 
I wan't to like Atari, but what have they released lately that was any good?
 
Red flag: "don't want to raise confidence about something that might not happen"

Tells me they aren't confident that they'll release anything at this point. After spending however much on development, with their fundraising campaign coming to an end and a failed pulled launch, if you aren't confident you are going to release something, then you might as well scrap it.
 
At the price they were quoting they won't be able to afford the cost to build. Memory is the killer, I guess from too much demand. They were going to use Bristol Ridge chips but they still can't get them cheap enough. It's looking like a non-starter.
 
For gods sake, a Pi can emulate every Atari system including arcade games, the Jaguar and ATARI ST. If they wanted to make a quick buck, that's the way to go.

Heck they could build an Atari "shieldTV" so they also do all the media center stuff and even some native games.
 
I don't understand the nostalgia appeal for 1980s gaming. I'm 45 this year, I grew up in the 1980s and graphics sucked then. Graphics always suck, that is why I spend over a $1K every few years on PC parts, for better graphics. I think this Atari was marketed towards millennial hipsters that still post on Tumblr.

 
I don't understand the nostalgia appeal for 1980s gaming. I'm 45 this year, I grew up in the 1980s and graphics sucked then. Graphics always suck, that is why I spend over a $1K every few years on PC parts, for better graphics. I think this Atari was marketed towards millennial hipsters that still post on Tumblr.


Being a millennial myself (ugh), I don't care much for atari. I prefer NES/SNES/Genesis and PSX, and some older PC/DOS games like Monkey Island and Loom (which also happened to be on c64, atari, and others). The graphics suck, and the music is basic (but catchy), but you can't beat the comedy, story, and/or gameplay that some of those old games had. Blast Chamber for playstation was ridiculous, but super fun multiplayer.

Of course I grew up watching and playing with my older brother's consoles, so I'm a bit biased.
 
Is was born in the early 80s and I do have fond memories of Atari when some older cousins gave me their Atari system and the games after they upgraded to a Nintendo. Yeah funny to think of that as an upgrade.

Years later I built a retro pi box. I tried the Atari games and found that I really couldn't go back. NES a little...
But most of my time on it has been SNES. The quality of some of those games was just outstanding.
 
Without taking a larger position on the article, I'd like to point out that anyone who says <blockquote>Mike tries to tell us that big product launches are suspended all the time. We tell him they really aren't, and on the rare occasion that they are, the company goes out of its way to explain why and give a new launch timeline.</blockquote> clearly has never heard of Kickstarter, where, right this minute, there's a controversy over a Timex-Sinclair nostalgia box (or one of those other 70s/80s 8-bit computers, and I CBA to look it up.) Or the people who took a pile of money for a quadcopter, sent a few badly-buggy ones to a few people and then closed up shop, and so on, and so on.


Or my personal favorite, the guy who bailed on a comic book after it was already printed and said not only was he not going to ship any because it was too stressful or whatever, but if people kept asking him about it he'd shred them.
 
Infogrames does not get the benefit of the doubt; their recent history of releasing low investment cash grabs speaks for itself.

I will second this. The atari box looks like a complete overpriced POS. Even if it lives up to it's name, I'm not buying any of this garbage.
 
This isn't Infogrames, they sold the Atari name around 2010, these schmucks bought the name a few years ago from whoever Infogrames sold it to.

The whole thing is a confusing mess, but this Atari is still the former Infogrames. Over the years they have sold off a ton of IPs and other parts of the company, but it has remained the same owners for a while. They went bankrupt in 2013, but ended up coming out of bankruptcy and have been moving along ever since.
 

I was originally going to use that term, but apparently they're not doing horribly from a financial standpoint. By no means are they raking in big bucks, but enough to comfortably exist. However, I question if they are making enough to fund the VCS without relying completely on whatever they bilk out of people pre-ordering one.
 
I was originally going to use that term, but apparently they're not doing horribly from a financial standpoint. By no means are they raking in big bucks, but enough to comfortably exist. However, I question if they are making enough to fund the VCS without relying completely on whatever they bilk out of people pre-ordering one.

Properly funding a retro system and bringing it to market seems to be running completely counter to their current business model: too high an investment is required to properly fund it (even for a more simple retro-only system) and they'd need to be able to show a product of sufficient quality to actually sell the things.

Much easier to create some videos and plastic models and then put it on indiegogo (notice that they didn't go to kickstarter). Now that they've sold the things they don't really need to show a quality product, just a functional one sufficient to keep them out of legal troubles.
 
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I don't understand the nostalgia appeal for 1980s gaming. I'm 45 this year, I grew up in the 1980s and graphics sucked then. Graphics always suck, that is why I spend over a $1K every few years on PC parts, for better graphics. I think this Atari was marketed towards millennial hipsters that still post on Tumblr.
It's just aimed at fortnite and pubg players who seem to enjoy terrible graphics and mediocre gameplay mechanics.
 
Without taking a larger position on the article, I'd like to point out that anyone who says <blockquote>Mike tries to tell us that big product launches are suspended all the time. We tell him they really aren't, and on the rare occasion that they are, the company goes out of its way to explain why and give a new launch timeline.</blockquote> clearly has never heard of Kickstarter, where, right this minute, there's a controversy over a Timex-Sinclair nostalgia box (or one of those other 70s/80s 8-bit computers, and I CBA to look it up.) Or the people who took a pile of money for a quadcopter, sent a few badly-buggy ones to a few people and then closed up shop, and so on, and so on.


Or my personal favorite, the guy who bailed on a comic book after it was already printed and said not only was he not going to ship any because it was too stressful or whatever, but if people kept asking him about it he'd shred them.

Nah, you can't compare Kickstarter to a video games industry veteran like Atari.

Anyways, in the recording, the interviewer sounds like a douche who knows nothing about video games hardware , or he is literally trolling asking nonsensical questions in order to get stupid responses. Will it play Crysis, can it controller my toaster oven, HOW MANY FPS DOES IT GET IN MINECRAFT? Does anyone really want Atari back?
 
Without taking a larger position on the article, I'd like to point out that anyone who says <blockquote>Mike tries to tell us that big product launches are suspended all the time. We tell him they really aren't, and on the rare occasion that they are, the company goes out of its way to explain why and give a new launch timeline.</blockquote> clearly has never heard of Kickstarter, where, right this minute, there's a controversy over a Timex-Sinclair nostalgia box (or one of those other 70s/80s 8-bit computers, and I CBA to look it up.) Or the people who took a pile of money for a quadcopter, sent a few badly-buggy ones to a few people and then closed up shop, and so on, and so on.


Or my personal favorite, the guy who bailed on a comic book after it was already printed and said not only was he not going to ship any because it was too stressful or whatever, but if people kept asking him about it he'd shred them.

I love reading about startup failures (as a biz fag), any sauce for the Timex-Sinclair, quadcopter and comic book episodes?
Kickstarter is an amazing lolcow.
 
I love reading about startup failures (as a biz fag), any sauce for the Timex-Sinclair, quadcopter and comic book episodes?

Some of these are years old so I probably have some details wrong, but let's dive in.

For the Timex--I was wrong, it was the Vega, a "ZX Spectrum-themed console". I'm not familiar with it, I guess it was more English?

Here's the quadcopter story--I think it's the one I was thinking of. They raised a ton of cash, backers were furious when they found out pre-orders when the thing was supposed to go commercial were getting theirs first, they didn't work well, nobody got refunds--and when the company went belly-up, the final insult was all the copters that had actually been delivered, were permanently disabled (maybe not deliberately? but they did phone home on powerup, and with the servers shut down, that's all she wrote.) Apparently, there been several spectacular quadcopter flameouts.



The "comic book" thing: shitty[1] webcomic guy burns through kickstarter cash, runs out of money to ship, burns 127 of them & puts video online, then sulks and threatens to burn the rest of the ones he didn't ship. All the sordid deets at the link below.

https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/201...st-raises-51k-publish-books-burns-them-alley/

[1] Seriously. There's pictures.
 
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Some of these are years old so I probably have some details wrong, but let's dive in.

For the Timex--I was wrong, it was the Vega, a "ZX Spectrum-themed console". I'm not familiar with it, I guess it was more English?

Here's the quadcopter story--I think it's the one I was thinking of. They raised a ton of cash, backers were furious when they found out pre-orders when the thing was supposed to go commercial were getting theirs first, they didn't work well, nobody got refunds--and when the company went belly-up, the final insult was all the copters that had actually been delivered, were permanently disabled (maybe not deliberately? but they did phone home on powerup, and with the servers shut down, that's all she wrote.) Apparently, there been several spectacular quadcopter flameouts.



The "comic book" thing: shitty[1] webcomic guy burns through kickstarter cash, runs out of money to ship, burns 127 of them & puts video online, then sulks and threatens to burn the rest of the ones he didn't ship. All the sordid deets at the link below.

https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/201...st-raises-51k-publish-books-burns-them-alley/

[1] Seriously. There's pictures.

That was beautiful, thanks!
I think my parents had a ZX spectrum when I was born (commonwealth so you might be on the mark there), then they got an Amstrad with dual tape decks, that was rad when I got to play a few games. Console sounds vaguely familiar though.
 
Hmmm... After this it's starting to feel like the Kanoa headset kickstarter all over again... I hate to do it as I would love a box which has all of the classic Atari games on it but I think it's time I ask about a refund.
 
Nah, you can't compare Kickstarter to a video games industry veteran like Atari.

Anyways, in the recording, the interviewer sounds like a douche who knows nothing about video games hardware , or he is literally trolling asking nonsensical questions in order to get stupid responses. Will it play Crysis, can it controller my toaster oven, HOW MANY FPS DOES IT GET IN MINECRAFT? Does anyone really want Atari back?

Sure, Infogrames is an industry veteran, but a veteran of providing mostly shit and occasionally publishing good games while, reportedly, being douchebags to the developers they work with.

The interviewer might be an ass, but it does not make the COO any less of a clueless idiot about the project he is leading. When you can't answer basic questions about your own product there is a pretty serious problem.
 
This reminded me I need to try and fix my Jaguar and Jaguar CD.
 
Sure, Infogrames is an industry veteran, but a veteran of providing mostly shit and occasionally publishing good games while, reportedly, being douchebags to the developers they work with.

The interviewer might be an ass, but it does not make the COO any less of a clueless idiot about the project he is leading. When you can't answer basic questions about your own product there is a pretty serious problem.
I Agree man, I was just saying you should expect more out of Atari than a Kickstarter project, which is what makes this failure worse.
 
My atari and 40 games still work great. Not seeing a need for an upgrade when my original works.
 
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