After more than 20 years of obscurity and recent dodgy dalliances with publishing, Atari has announced it’s making an all-new video games console. This is the same Atari which filed for bankruptcy in 2013, before resurfacing as a mobile-oriented publisher focusing on “LGBT, social casinos, real-money gambling, and YouTube”. It’s been a roller coaster for Atari, which at one point was one of the biggest names in video games with the Atari 2600. Then the great video game crash of 1983 happened, Nintendo stepped up to the plate, and the rest is history.
Atari’s new console will be called the Atari Box, and it will be based on standard PC components. In the teaser trailer, it also looks as if it’s going to have the same iconic fake wood panelling found on the older Atari consoles. Expect to see Atari raid its back catalogue of classics, including Pitfall!, Asteroids, Frogger and, erm, ET.
At this point, your guess is as good as mine as to what the Atari box even entails. Are they sitting on another landfill Raspberry Pi knock-off? Or are we talking a genuinely capable modern games console? I suspect it’s the former. One thing’s for sure, Atari’s older consoles haven’t aged well at all, so they’re going to need something more to impress than a simple retro emulator.
