Atari’s upcoming console has raised over $2 million in just one day of pre-sales.
For nearly a year now, Atari has been teasing a faux-wood paneled return to the home console market. The company that has been subsisting on Rollercoaster Tycoon sequels had all but fallen into obscurity before releasing a set of bizarre images last year that seemed to show a console very reminiscent of Atari’s original 1980’s designs.
A year later and we finally get to see what Atari has been keeping secret for so long. In what just might be the most successful game console crowdfunding campaign in history, Atari is back with a new home entertainment system: the Atari VCS.
We’re not quite certain what VCS stands for. It could be “virtual console system” or “video console system”, but it almost definitely ends with “console system”. What we do know is a lot of key specifications and that a lot of people are clamoring to get their hands on this system without even knowing how it’ll work.
Thankfully, Atari has released enough info that we can really start to draw our own conclusions. At 3 lbs, this box isn’t going to blow away any of the current generation consoles in terms of power. The Indiegogo page mentions an AMD processor and a Radeon video card, but they’re not likely to be the top of the line models as they’re going to be mostly powering a bunch of old-school Atari games.
The Atari VCS will come preloaded with over 100 classic Atari titles, such as Asteroids, Space Invaders, Missile Command, and of course, Pong. Atari has also promised there will be new games released by the time the console ships next year, including the upcoming shoot ‘em up, Tempest 4000.
The VCS will also come with HDMI, USB C support for various peripherals, and run on a heavily modified version of Ubuntu, an open-source Linux OS. Everything about the console will be open source, with Atari stating there are various game developers working right now to create brand new games for their console.
You can get your VCS with a classic joystick, a new Xbox-inspired Atari controller, or just use your own USB-compatible controllers and buy the console on its own.
As for whether or not it’ll work… Atari managed to make $2,264,168 in sales in one day. Imagine how much they’ll make in a month? And if it actually gets popular, imagine how much they’ll make at Christmas time?
Atari just might actually become a household name again.