Rob Wyatt, the architect behind the original Xbox and someone Atari hired to work on the Atari VCS system is now suing Atari over their failure to actually pay up.
This is something we mentioned last year, when it was announced that Wyatt left Atari on poor terms, mentioning how they hadn't actually been paid for over six months and they were left with no choice but to leave the project. Since then, we've not heard much. Atari continued putting out their development blog posts, showing off pictures of units in production in China and delaying the release. Spotted by VentureBeat and confirmed here, Tin Giant (Rob Wyatt's company), are now suing Atari over a "Breach of Contract". According to the suit, Atari owes something around $261,720 which is no small sum.
All this is going on while Atari also mentioned in a recent update about COVID-19 and the VCS production, stating they had enough to build only 500 units by the end of March and those would be developer kits and none of them going to backers. They said they planned to "ship to all backers at the same time when enough VCS units and peripherals are available". Their wording is interesting, as they don't directly say it's been delayed but it quite clearly has been, again.
Real shame to see Atari constantly screwing up on this one. A Linux-powered, small form factor and quite stylish unit could have been great.
Not sure what I expect at this point, this is from the company who emails people on the Atari VCS list about their upcoming "Atari Casino" where you play with cryptocurrency including their "upcoming Atari Token"—oh dear. That feels pretty gross. There's a lot of trust issues going on, repeated delays and now a lawsuit over not paying someone they made a big splash about joining them.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Apr 3, 2020
Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhatever else you say about these guys, their project has provided a lot of entertainment. It may never yield a game box, but it's already given us an excellent soap opera.The Atacobox thread over at AtariAge is quite possibly one of the most epic forum threads ever.
So at least they have given us that! A lot of their demo videos are belived to be running Windows, that would irritate me since they made such a big deal about it being Linux based.
LMFAO
slaapliedje Apr 3, 2020
Quoting: CestusAt this point people should be happy if they get a Raspberry pi with emulation station tuned for atari 2600.Ha, why would they be happy with that? I could build basically a 2600 out of an Arduino or something for less than the 200-300 bucks they were asking for these things.
LMFAO
There were many saying that is all this ever was anyhow. I actually think at least a small few of the people working on it sound like they are very much Atari fans and want this to happen. But then I also had heard that Robert Wyatt didn't actually do much while there, and most of the time he was supposed to have been working for them, he had broken something from a skydiving accident. So there is that. So much good nerd drama!
slaapliedje Apr 4, 2020
Quoting: GuestAfter stuff like the Coleco Chameleon and Atari Gameband i'm suprised people still fall for these dubious nostalgia-bait crowdfunding projects. I don't get why people even wanted this thing in the first place, when you take away the fancy controller and case it's nothing more than an decently-specced Linux box with a bunch of pre-installed Atari-branded crap.Decent specs, good form factor, Linux. Pretty much says it all. Nostalgia isn't really a thing about this, because anyone who knows anything about Atari knows this really isn't them in anything but name and what's left of their IP that they haven't sold off.
Quoting: GuestAfter stuff like the Coleco Chameleon and Atari Gameband i'm suprised people still fall for these dubious nostalgia-bait crowdfunding projects. I don't get why people even wanted this thing in the first place, when you take away the fancy controller and case it's nothing more than an decently-specced Linux box with a bunch of pre-installed Atari-branded crap.
nostalgic fans are blind, and after the oton console, we can be sure that linux fans are blind too:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/oton-x-claims-to-be-the-first-artificial-intelligent-games-console-its-powered-by-linux.7996
it was an obvious scan, and some people still believed it could be true, we should focus our money in projects that alredy proved they can deliver something instead of this bullshit, why fund an obvious scan like this when we could have funded projects like gimp, godot and blender?
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