
Atari VCS Lead Architect Quits, Claims Six Months of Design Work Went Unpaid - rbanffy
https://hothardware.com/news/atari-vcs-lead-architect-quits-claims-six-months-unpaid
======
gamegod
There's an 881 page thread of people ripping this "Atari" project to shreds on
the AtariAge forums. People could smell the BS even back in 2017:
[https://atariage.com/forums/topic/266480-new-atari-
console-t...](https://atariage.com/forums/topic/266480-new-atari-console-that-
ataribox)

At some point in that thread around summer 2019, a photo of their "prototype"
hardware was released, and it's just a stock embedded Ryzen dev board - not
custom hardware at all. After 2 years, they had nothing done. It gets even
better: They realized their original case design from 2017 was too costly and
had to redesign it in Spring 2019: [https://medium.com/@atarivcs/atari-vcs-
structural-improvemen...](https://medium.com/@atarivcs/atari-vcs-structural-
improvements-and-feature-adjustments-ba4ee3af5317)

Even in 2019, all they had were renders of both their old and new case
designs, and that blog post really goes to show how unprepared they were. Any
moron with CAD experience could have told them their original design would
have been a nightmare to manufacture/assemble.

~~~
Judgmentality
> There's an 881 page thread

Holy shit. As someone who loves to find stories on "what went wrong" for
startups and especially kickstarters, this is a gold mine. Especially because
it 100% independent from Atari's censorship. Here's a comment I just found on
page 750:

> I'm not sure what you're adding to the discourse, but I think this thread is
> a healthy alternative to:
    
    
        Self-serving, highly censored comments on the IndieGoGo project page (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving, highly censored comments in the Facebook discussion thread (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving, highly censored comments in the Instagram feed (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving Twitter threads (managed by "Atari")
        Self-serving puff pieces on Fox Business News for audiences from hosts who don't care to audiences who care even less
        More independent, but constrained by relentless positivity, Atari VCS Reddit group (managed by @Historian but infected with Dubs syndrome, and occasionally visited by "Atari," who doesn't have anything to say)
    

> If "Atari" felt like coming in here to clear the air, they're more than
> welcome to do so. There's literally nothing stopping them. What are they
> going to do? Swoop in here and say "just wait you guys, we've got lots of
> announcements planned for later this summer!" Because that's all they've
> done to date. Every time some nimrod falls for the "ooh look, Atari is
> back," this highly critical but not-so-serious thread gains a new reason for
> existing.

It's mostly just a bunch of guys joking around about it, but it's actually
interesting (having looked at maybe 1% of the content).

~~~
donquichotte
> As someone who loves to find stories on "what went wrong" for startups and
> especially kickstarters, this is a gold mine.

Then you will love the Peachy Printer fiasco:

[https://3dprint.com/133842/peachy-printer-
embezzlement/](https://3dprint.com/133842/peachy-printer-embezzlement/)

~~~
Judgmentality
Thank you for that! This one might be my favorite:

[https://www.thedrive.com/news/2559/the-weird-wild-saga-of-
gi...](https://www.thedrive.com/news/2559/the-weird-wild-saga-of-gizmondo-
part-1)

It reads like a Hollywood script that would be rejected for being too
unbelievable.

------
dmix
From the sub linked article on what VCS is:

> Arzt says that Atari is targeting two groups, with one being the folks over
> 35-years-old who remember playing the console and playing Atari games in the
> arcade. The other group is the younger crowd that Arzt says see Atari as
> more of a cool old brand and want modern capabilities like Streaming video
> services such as Hulu and Netflix. Arzt says that the Atari VCS is less
> expensive than a PC and eliminates the need to connect a laptop to the TV.

Who the hell is going to pay $300 for a glorified emulator slash Chromecast?

Considering the 2nd group likely already has a $30-50 Netflix device and the
first group has had plenty of options to emulate old Atari (and every other
system’s) games for years.

Not a big fan of this Hollywood approach to branding. A retro brand doesn’t
make your product interesting, at most it’s a foot in the door.

~~~
grawprog
I could see it selling for the same reason things like the snes classic do.
Nostalgia goggles combined with a dislike of, I guess, unofficial emulation,
for whatever reasons that don't make much sense to me. Either that or for the
slightly more interesting things people do with these things like hacking and
modding them. For me though, retroarch seems to have 99% of everything I'd
ever want to emulate covered so...meh.

~~~
shantly
The controllers, mostly, for me. Which Just Work and don't decide to become
unmapped for no damn reason (admittedly less common on Retroarch/Lakka systems
than others, though). I mean those things are _legit_. About as close to the
originals as you could hope, and I've side-by-sided them. Only real loss on
the NES are the four-score games (Super Spike V'Ball and World Cup Soccer are
both _actually_ good and are _actually_ good with four players!) and light gun
games, of which I love two but would only really defend one as even sort-of
worth a damn (Duck Hunt). Still don't get why that wasn't on the Wii. SNES
classic, on the other hand, is damn near perfect. After you hakchi all your
other games on, in both cases, obviously.

NES controllers especially are great for kids, for whom even SNES controllers
are confusing with their four face buttons plus two shoulders—and I remember,
as an NES kid who didn't get another console until I bought myself a PS2 in
college, finding anything with more buttons than a 3-button Sega Genesis
controller kinda tricky at first, though I _eventually_ managed well enough to
hold my own on some N64 games at friends' houses. Only "complicated"
controller I've found to be almost as usable for my young kids is the Gamecube
controller, so they got that right after all I guess.

Sure you can get knock-offs, but Nintendo doesn't screw around with controller
quality, even on cheapish emulator systems.

[EDIT] also I've owned two Wii-connector-to-USB adapters, both from Mayflash,
and both were janky and soon stopped working at all, so just buying the
controllers (or just using the Wii Classic Pro controller, which is what I
actually attempted those times) hasn't given me acceptable reliability.

------
Dotnaught
From The Register:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_quits/)

------
ilaksh
If they aren't paying one of lead developers for this amount of time then
management is basically stealing from the people doing the actual work.

In my opinion, technical companies should not have managers or executives (who
don't simultaneously hold technical roles). They are just parasites without
skills who inappropriately have power over the skilled people under them.

This is just one of many examples of that.

------
ulkesh
Looks like I dodged a bullet as I was close to pulling the trigger on backing
the Indiegogo campaign. This proves to me that when it comes to semi-expensive
hardware, it’s best to wait for some version of the product to actually exist
before committing any funds. I already made that mistake backing the Airing
CPAP which has yet to deliver 5.5 years after the campaign with one excuse
after another. Fool me once?

It’s probably past time for crowdfunding vaporware to die.

------
JohnJamesRambo
This is the first I’m hearing of the Atari VCS. As someone that lived through
the original Atari era I don’t think most of the games would hold up for much
replay ability at all. They were fun because they were all we had. They were
very crude. Pitfall was one of the best and I can’t imagine myself playing
that for more than a few minutes. Commodore 64 games on the other hand would
still be quite fun today.

~~~
reaperducer
My wife bought me six carts earlier this week. I play for a few hours at least
every other week.

Most games are very playable because they were designed to be good to play,
not to be flashy for Twitch and VC money.

The best part is that the games that you couldn't afford to buy back when they
were new are $3 used, or $0 emulated. So you can play anything you want.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
What games do you like? Are you playing them on an original Atari 2600? That’s
awesome.

~~~
reaperducer
I gravitate toward the really old ones for nostalgia's sake. The ones with the
text-only labels.

But the ones I play most often are the ones with good gameplay: Dig Dug,
Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tron, Air Sea Battle, Moon Patrol, Jungle Hunt.

I play on real hardware. There's a place in Pittsburgh called DK Oldies that
sells refurbed 2600's online with a 90-day warranty.

I have one of those Retron77 machines, too, but it doesn't work with all
games. Most notably, paddle games. Which is a shame because I really like
Circus Atari.

------
hinkley
I’m not sure the situation here, but I’ve always wondered why the disconnect
is so big between creative work and what people will pay. You ask someone to
do a bunch of work, and then people feel justified in only wanting to pay for
the bit they are going to use (or not pay at all if they don’t want it).

I wonder if this comes from our interactions with large companies. We go in,
we see a bunch of products that we are not the customer for, and then we pick
one and buy it. We ignore the rest, but for each product, somewhere out there
is another customer who will buy it.

But when we hire someone, we want something custom. There is no other market
for the options we reject. They are dancing solely for our amusement. Whether
we or amused or not, we are taking up their time.

~~~
zamadatix
Also I don't think most people consider what portion "time" was of the
purchase price. You think about buying gas or eating out and it's the price of
"gas" or "eating takeout" that costs a lot of money. Everyone is aware there
are a lot of people employed by those industries but their time isn't what
usually comes to mind. Take this logic to an extreme case like custom creative
work and you're bound to have a clash of mentality with reality and that is
bound to go far when most don't understand why exactly it takes so much time
to end up with the piece you were going to use.

~~~
XorNot
"Money is deferred human labor" was something a commentator here posted in a
cryptocurrency thread, and it's the best possible explanation I think I've
ever heard for what money really "is".

The fact it took a decent portion of my 30-odd years on the earth to hear it,
despite taking a number of economics classes, means it's also not a common way
it's expressed - which in turn means the above - that "time" is a part of what
you're paying for - doesn't really come into most thinking.

~~~
Danieru
The reason you did not hear about it in economics classes is because money
being human time is an old and rather out modeded understanding of money.

~~~
benj111
Is this a disagreement over semantics?

How do you add value to something? Either through human labour, or raw
material inputs, and I would guess many raw materials gain their value
entirely from the human labour put in to extracting them.

If you buy an iphone, you are paying someone to mine the raw material, refine
it, make it in to chips, make it into a phone, box it, ship it, then paying
some marketers to tell you why you need it.

Yes the tiny amounts of gold, and rare earth elements have value, 99% of an
iPhones value comes from people's time.

~~~
NortySpock
A machine running and converting raw material into finished product (say,
injection-molded plastic, or a part-picker-placer organizing or soldering on a
PCB) rapidly turns less-valuable-stuff into more-valuable-stuff. Value added.

Yes, there is some human labor in assembling and maintaining the machine, but
I consider it largely divorced from human labor.

A computer server turns data into more-useful data, either by aggregating it,
storing it in a convenient way, or routing it. Once set up, the computer can
run for years without human intervention. Very little human labor there after
initial setup, but value was added.

~~~
benj111
To return to your computer server example though, these things require so
little labour add so little value[1], that they're very nearly / actually are
free. A google search is free, posting a message to HN is free.

I agree that as you add layers of machines, you get more divorced from the
original labour, I was going to say that labour provides the lower bound,
maybe my prior paragraph shows that isn't true, of course there are costs to
those 2 activities, they just aren't borne directly by us.

As I put in a sibling comment, it's a model, not suited to everything, but
suited to evaluating buying v building an Atari emulator.

[1] I suppose you could argue that computers add lots of value, but
competition has reduced the price down to approximately the labour cost. I'm
probably not using strictly economics terms here.

------
Angostura
Original source on the story:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_quits/)

------
bbanyc
This is something like the fourth or fifth unrelated company with the Atari
name, but at least the previous ones actually made games. This one just looks
like the Infinium Phantom redux.

------
magashna
I kind of understand the want for the mini NES/SNES/PSX or any consoles with
relatively unique controllers. You can get a rPi and a decent arcade stick for
less than $100. What's the appeal of this? I believe archive.org hosts every
MAME ROM, it's not like you'd even need to visit a less than reputable site to
put this all together.

~~~
hoopism
I wouldn't lump this in with the recent mini NES or SNES. Nintendo has a loyal
fan base and a proven track record. They made something simple and well built
for fans of their IP. Atari isn't even a thing anymore. Someone bought the
name and attempted to cash in on it. They used crowdfunding and scammed
consumers out fo 3M+ dollars.

Basically I can see why people might want something more official than an rPi
if it's done well and by original company. But Atari thing is not that.

~~~
magashna
Atari definitely isn't the same caliber as Nintendo/Sony, but I think it's the
same market which is why they were able to get $3M in funding. All the other
mini remakes sold gangbusters from what I recall.

------
hoopism
This came up back in 2017 and I was skeptical then...
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15348270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15348270)

I blame the journalists covering this stuff. There was so many PR release
articles touting this thing based on renders... nobody looked into the people
who were responsible on executing it.

These guys have no skills in building a gaming console. They bought a brand
and scammed people out of 3M+.

------
Endy
Isn't six months of unpaid dev work about par for the course for Atari? Fight
for Life, the Jaguar itself, and more. And my memory says Infogrames wasn't
too swift either. Why did anyone sign onto this expecting that to have changed
in 30 years?

On the other hand, the @tGames Atari Flashback 8 is fun to play with, though I
do use wired controllers, not the wireless ones!

------
olliej
Is it really quitting if you aren't being paid?

------
al2o3cr
You gotta admire the dedication to exactly reproducing how consoles were made
in the '80s

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m3kw9
Bad feeling about this console haha

