New Atari Console that Ataribox?

[MrBeefy]

Is anyone just appreciative that any of this atari stuff is still out there? I mean everyone wanted a new hardware system. Now that retro 77 is out it seems to be getting picked apart. I sometimes feel the retro players will never be happy until they can go back in time.

 

I'm happy that I can get a convienent flashback which I will be getting both the Activision 8 and portable. And I'm glad to have another way to play if my hardware craps out.

 

I'm intrigued by the ataribox

[+Sauron]

I'm intrigued by the ataribox

 

I'll be intrigued by it once I know what it actually is. Most everyone here seems to be operating under the assumption that it's a game console of some sort, and I'm not quite sure that it is.

[CPUWIZ]

 

I'm not quite sure that it is.

 

It is called marketing hype for a product that needs to be funded.

[Keatah]

Is anyone just appreciative that any of this atari stuff is still out there? I mean everyone wanted a new hardware system. Now that retro 77 is out it seems to be getting picked apart. I sometimes feel the retro players will never be happy until they can go back in time.

 

So if the RetroN 77 is out, where can it be purchased? Otherwise it's bullshit internet talk - till it actually comes to a store where it can be purchased.

[Corby]

*cashes out pension*

[+KaeruYojimbo]

I'm intrigued by the ataribox

 

I'm intrigued by it too, but I can't be excited about it or disappointed with it because I have no idea what it actually is other than a box with some fake wood grain and a Fuji logo.

Edited June 26, 2017 by KaeruYojimbo

[Zonie]

Ah, let him dream Flojo...

It was a joke...

[zzip]

 

What we know for certain is that Atari was in dire financial straits and needed a buyer quickly. Considering how little Jack actually paid for Atari, it's safe to assume that Warner most likely would have folded Atari and sold off its remaining assets. And claiming Warner would have been better in the console market is a bit ridiculous, considering that the last Warner era console (the 5200) was a failure and I believe sold worse than the 7800. Your "what ifs" completely ignore the reality of the situation back in 1984.

 

And regardless, this has nothing to do with the assertion that Tramiel era Atari should be considered "real Atari".

 

true they were in bad shape, but they had already been through restructuring and the bleeding would have stopped at some point. They had been a cash cow before that so I guess it's a matter of how much patience Warner would have for things to turn around. Remember that Warner was unable to sell the "Atari Games" arcade division, but they didn't dismantle it and kept it for many years after.

 

Console sales picked up shortly after Tramiel bought Atari. Remember Tramiel had little interest in selling consoles. They've said they decided to get back into the console business after they unexpectedly sold many more 2600s than anticipated. This sales would have still happened under Warner, but they would have some advantages:

1. all their competitors exited the market,

2. they probably wouldn't have the GCC contract issue and would have been ready to sell 7800s as early as 1984 as planned before Nintendo became a threat.

3. they possibly wouldn't have bungled the Amiga deal, and their post07800 console could be Amiga-chipset based as planned, and not the cheaply-conceived XEGS.

 

There's a good chance under Warner, Atari would have put up a much bigger fight against Nintendo, assuming they weren't selling NES themselves. If SMB started moving units, Atari would have funded a major IP to counter it, because market share is at stake. Warner has the resources to do this, and market it properly. Tramiel did everything on the cheap and could not have pulled that off.

 

Warner Atari would also have exclusive home rights to arcade games like Gauntlet, Marble Madness, Road Blasters, and all the other late 80s / early 90s arcade games. There likely wouldn't have been a Tengen label.

 

Also I think Warner would have likely discontinued the computer business much sooner than Tramiel did, it was clear in the late 80s that everything was going PC.

 

So I just don't believe Tramiel was the best deal Atari could have gotten. He chased a declining computer biz while missing the boat on a booming console biz, which by all rights Atari should have been positioned to be dominant.

 

But anyway, I never said Tramiel wasn't legit Atari. I just said the current owner is just as legit as he was, since Tramiel essentially formed a new company from the wreckage.

[+Nathan Strum]

Machine translation:

...

About Atari

Atari, made up of Atari SA and its subsidiaries, is a global group of interactive entertainment and multiplatform licenses.

 

Nope, that doesn't sound right...

 

About Atari

Atari, made up of Atari SA and its subsidiaries, is a global group

 

Still not quite...

 

About Atari

Atari, made up

 

There we go!

[Schizophretard]

 

This is something I'm curious about. When does "real" Atari begin and end for most people? Is it just Bushnell and Dabney Atari? Warner Communications? Tramiel Atari? Hasbro Atari? Infogrames? Atari Interactive? Atari SA? Someone show me the cut off point.

 

I can't think of a cut off point because it is more like a spectrum between living and dead. It is like zombies. There is alive and healthy, there is bitten, there is sick, there is temporarily dead, there is resurrection to undead, there is rotting, and then there is dead dead with a bullet to the brain. So, with that analogy, I would say that Atari at its peak before the crash was alive and healthy but today it is more like a bullet an inch away from their zombie skull because everything is almost completely rotted away with the only thing left to die is the "brain"(brand name). So, I can't really point to an exact event and time of when Atari stopped being recognizable as the real Atari. I can just point out that today I see a corpse that is almost a skeleton that is struggling just to crawl to my feet and even though it looks Atarish by being able to make out what appears to be an Atari tattoo on its head my instincts still tell me to pull the trigger because I doubt its goal of getting to my feet has anything to do with other times we met in the past as friends.

[Keatah]

I like the rotting part..

[Flojomojo]

Zzip, I also think your Warner scenario is unrealistic -- I doubt they'd pay through the nose to keep a failing dovision afloat. Then again, they'd buy AOL for $160B a decade later, so who knows what kind of bonkers things would happen?

 

Maybe if they still had Atari, their investors would have lost their appetite for crazy investment schemes, and they'd be an even bigger media force than they are today.

 

It's only because of Microsoft's willingness to lose massive amounts of cash over many years that we have an Xbox division, the biggest game hardware maker in the west. It takes serious cash to play in this space.

[zzip]

Zzip, I also think your Warner scenario is unrealistic -- I doubt they'd pay through the nose to keep a failing dovision afloat. Then again, they'd buy AOL for $160B a decade later, so who knows what kind of bonkers things would happen?

 

Maybe if they still had Atari, their investors would have lost their appetite for crazy investment schemes, and they'd be an even bigger media force than they are today.

 

It's only because of Microsoft's willingness to lose massive amounts of cash over many years that we have an Xbox division, the biggest game hardware maker in the west. It takes serious cash to play in this space.

 

It depends what year we are talking about. In 1984, no they wouldn't dump money into it. But 85/86 when consoles are selling and growing again, and if NES comes in and SMB starts selling, I think they absolutely would have spent the money to defend their market share, with the assumption they'd make it back through growing sales.

 

Investor appetites are cyclical. In downtimes, they don't have much appetite. In good times they have lots.

Edited June 27, 2017 by zzip

[Flojomojo]

Maybe, depending on the investors. I know that as a young teen fan, even *I* thought console gaming was dead back then.

 

I wish I could find the Nolan Bushnell quote where he said that he wished he had held on to Atari longer but sold Chuck E Cheese sooner.

[zzip]

Maybe, depending on the investors. I know that as a young teen fan, even *I* thought console gaming was dead back then.

 

I wish I could find the Nolan Bushnell quote where he said that he wished he had held on to Atari longer but sold Chuck E Cheese sooner.

 

Yup, but that's typical of investor/market psychology. When things are down, it's hard to imagine things ever improving and optimists seem to be crazy. But when things are growing, it's hard to imagine that the bottom could drop out.

 

There's a pattern that seems to repeat for any significant new technology, be it games, dot-coms, etc:

phase 1. excitement, hype, predictions of exponential growth. Feeling that the sky's the limit, Investors rush in and fund some ridiculous and crazy ideas

phase 2. Bottom drops out. Investors pull their funding, the craziest ideas really were crazy after all, lots of pain, doom and gloom for a few years

phase 3. original idea was sound but got ahead of itself, it recovers and grows even bigger than in phase 1. But growth is more sound this time and isn't prone to the craziness.

[+Sauron]

But anyway, I never said Tramiel wasn't legit Atari. I just said the current owner is just as legit as he was, since Tramiel essentially formed a new company from the wreckage.

 

You're spinning in circular logic regarding Warner keeping Atari, so I'll just let that die in the breeze to address this. Tramiel still relied heavily on the assets of the old Atari for a while as a cash cow to fund the ST's development. Tramiel Atari was a direct continuation of Warner Atari. Modern day "InfoAtari" is a direct continuation of a dead IP. There's a pretty damn big difference between the two.

[Keatah]

So Tramiel's Atari continued to develop stuff. What came after him did not.

[MrBeefy]

So if the RetroN 77 is out, where can it be purchased? Otherwise it's bullshit internet talk - till it actually comes to a store where it can be purchased.

The news is 'out' that they are making it.

[MrBeefy]

 

I'll be intrigued by it once I know what it actually is. Most everyone here seems to be operating under the assumption that it's a game console of some sort, and I'm not quite sure that it is.

I agree that it won't be a console in the traditional sense I really don't think it will have any arcade, 2600, 7800, etc games on it. If it has nothing to do with legacy hardware that would exclude all of that.

[JDTAY]

New Atari press release from the GlobeNewswire.

 

http://inpublic.globenewswire.com/releaseDetails.faces?rId=2116347

 

Doesn't say much, but under hardware plans, it notes both continued work on Ataribox and work on an audio connected device for release in fall 2017. I dunno, I'm just going off machine translation. Anyone here parlez vous francais?

[Atari_Warlord]

Maybe this box only plays the new Atari TV shows (Atari Codebreaker).

[+davidcalgary29]

New Atari press release from the GlobeNewswire.

 

http://inpublic.globenewswire.com/releaseDetails.faces?rId=2116347

 

Doesn't say much, but under hardware plans, it notes both continued work on Ataribox and work on an audio connected device for release in fall 2017. I dunno, I'm just going off machine translation. Anyone here parlez vous francais?

 

I dunno, it says quite a bit about the company's plans to milk the Atari brand for every last, thin penny. And that it's a heritage brand with two "money making properties" (Rollercoaster Tycoon gets star billing over "Ataribox") and no in-house development team.

 

I note with interest that "Ataribox" is grouped outside of its video game subsection, which suggests that the project is a) protean and mutable and b) something to do with the Internet of Things as much as gaming.

[Keatah]

Pretty much for certain it has nothing to do with the original VCS. Because if it did, it would would be easily definable and they'd be talking about it. No need for hype on such a system. And there's only so much hype a simple 3-chip console can generate anyways.

 

Internet of Things market is already overcrowded with bullshit items. We don't need anything more in that category. Shit. We don't need anything AT ALL in that category. Same thing with streaming set-top boxes. There's like a billion of them out there and we don't need more.

 

Whatever it is it is unlikely to satisfy the vast intellect that is me.

[Keatah]

I note with interest that "Ataribox" is grouped outside of its video game subsection, which suggests that the project is a) protean and mutable and b) something to do with the Internet of Things as much as gaming.

 

The question is what though? What could they possibly make that we would want and can't get elsewhere? Most everyone here (I would hope) is against frivolous connectivity devices. We certainly are at my place.

 

Regarding these set top boxes and streaming internet tv "channels". It's all rather confusing and tedious and full of too many one-offs. I never subscribe to anything just to watch a mini-series of like 5 episodes of something.

[The Historian]

While I expect AtariBox to be a "thing that connects to the internet", I don't think it will fall into that "internet of things" bucket like Nest, Alexa or Ring.