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Michael Arzt, chief operating officer of Atari Connected Devices and the designated ambassador for the VCS 800 console that is fast approaching (and subject to moderate controversy), is, it is safe to say, frustrated . The VCS 800 is not, he says, a retro console. And he wants to make things clear about it.
To be honest, I can not really blame him. If you're looking for the VCS 800 on Google, you'll get many results indicating that it's a retro console – even in cases that recognize that it's not really that kind of thing!
For the sake of fairness vis-à-vis game authors, we live an era of crazy retro housings, since virtually all gaming devices of the 80s and 90s are reborn in miniature, stuffed with an emulator and ROM games often questionable. "classic", and sold to an audience who, well, may or may not want. It's really weird to see a box on which is written "Atari" and realize that it is not a collection of classic games in a tiny container designed for an easy and impulsive purchase. But then, Atari do it alreadyand this has been done for years, on different editions.
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The VCS 800 is not a retro console. Instead, as Arzt and the rest of Atari sell it, this is a newlooking to the future"Console, which in all honesty seems to be an even stranger decision. The crowdfunding site Indiegogo has been sensational: it has collected several million dollars and transferred 12,000 prerequisites orders in a few days, which has resulted in a breakdown of the site, but 12,000 customers are not a base. ecosystem installation of players or developers, at least not yet. Video game consoles often rely on a fast-paced snowball effect to establish a stable and continuous business model, and although Atari seems to have the necessary mechanisms to allow this, I do not know how that will be done. The VCS 800 is not a powerful system compared to the existing generation of Xbox and PlayStation consoles, themselves six years old now. Given the environment in which the VCS 800 will launch at the end of the year, I understand why people think it's a retro device, because that's the only thing that seems to make sense.
However, the VCS 800 is not limited to the aspirations of its console, namely its sandbox. Sandbox is a bit unsuitable because the feature actually allows dual booting of the device and running a totally different operating system, including Windows or Linux. It is neither a virtual drive nor an installation. If you insert a bootable USB storage device into the VCS 800 with Windows or Linux on it, you will have the option to select that other drive. The Atari dialog works on an on-chip AMD system designed for laptops. The hardware and memory configuration is very advantageously comparable to that of a laptop with sufficient capabilities, even though it has an integrated AMD graphics processor supporting HDMI 2.1 and 4K / 60 video formats.
Without selling it that way, Atari has created one of the most attractive decoder computers yet.
Nothing prevents someone from installing Steam on his VCS 800 (on a Windows or Linux installation) and using it to read lightweight indie titles or use it for Steam's home broadcast at 4k60, assuming their main system can handle this. The VCS 800 hardware can easily run any Media Center for Windows suite, or any Linux-based top-set suite you could choose, and for a fraction of the price of anything everyone could try to create by his own means. And Atari does it cheaply, available from at least one major retailer (the VCS 800 is available at Walmart and Gamestop, but its presence in retail is currently under severe strain).
I think Atari wants the VCS 800 to be what they hoped for, but the climb to this point seems extremely steep. In the meantime, we can at least say that the device is not limited to retro games – which, by the way, are included in the device. So it may be a little bit of retro – and an unproven console environment.
The Atari VCS 800 will begin shipping to contributors in December 2019.
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