Atari’s Restless Ghost released NFTs

Atari, the company / brand of Theseus, just made around $ 110,000 selling – you guessed it – NFTs (shout at Ars Technica to do the math). The tokens in question are 3D models of the Atari 2600 game cartridge for Centipede – 10 of them black, 100 of them red.

NFTs are sold as part of the Atari Capsule Collection – which is basically a bunch of Centipede and Pongthemed NFTs sold by the company which now owns the Atari brand. The company and its intellectual property have been bought and sold so many times that it’s almost hard to keep track of them, but its current incarnation is mostly known for trying to build hotels and struggling to make a game console.

As jaded as I am, I can admit that there is at least one interesting part of Atari’s NFT offerings: the Lighthouse centipede. According to the company, the NFT part is just another 3D model, but the first person to buy it will get a real life, original and restored. Centipede arcade cabinet. But if regular NFTs that only included a 3D model were selling for thousands of dollars, I don’t even want to think about how much this one will sell for.

Image: Atari

We talk a lot about NFTs, often as collectibles, but these are especially puzzling – they’ve sold for $ 180.78 to over $ 16,000. As Ars points out that if you wanted to get a real Centipede 2600 cartridge, with the box, manual and everything, you can go to eBay and spend $ 30 (or $ 53 if you want it sealed). Collector-grade versions of the game recently sold for around $ 500, and auctions for them are starting in that territory as well. Same original Centipede arcade cabinets cost less than some of these NFTs.

If the point is to feel that you own something, that you have collected it, what would give you more of that feeling: an NFT or a copy of the actual game? The NFT would give you an entry on the blockchain, certifying that you own a 3D model (which is identical to all other versions), but a physical cartridge can be displayed on a shelf or actually played. And that doesn’t even take into account the physical versions that have history – you can always try to track down one of the versions of the game that Atari buried in the desert in 1983. They’ve already been sold on eBay for about $ 600 and come with an origin story that can’t really be matched by an NFT.

What if you needed another reason why you should save your money and just buy a physical copy of Centipede, here’s the kicker: These were created by the genuine original Atari, not the company that owns its name these days.