For anyone having grown up in the 1970s to early 1990s, Atari is a brand name that they cannot have missed. While the Atari brand name has been used by a number of companies over the years, the memory association of the brand has always been those classic retro gaming consoles where you’d insert coins to play games. The company has continued to exist even after all those years, and has now been sized down to just 10 employees. In what looks like one final, desperate attempt to gain some sort of market share, Atari now plans to launch the Ataribox console.
Atari had been teasing the Ataribox for a week now. Last week the company floated a link on social media that led the users to a website which had nothing but a video that offered a glimpse of the new console being prepared by the company. The site too, looks like it has been built in a hurry, using the free website builder Wix. It is very unlikely that Atari plans to build a gaming console for private use.
Considering that they are sized down to about ten employees and that they are on the verge of bankruptcy, the once mighty Atari is perhaps about to launch a new gaming console for public use - the way they used to be. The Ataribox is still a mystery and not much is known about it as of now. The teaser video on Ataribox website shows a wood panel from various angles and that’s pretty much all there is.
The gaming markets are a tough place to compete in. Gizmodo gives a good analogy stating that Microsoft, which is among the biggest tech firms in the world spent $100 Million to conceptualize only the controller of the XBOX One, and despite all the money that they are spending, they’re still ranked third in the console markets.
Atari, a company that has been beaten black and blue over the years, struggling to stay away from bankruptcy cannot afford to make a mistake - hopefully, whatever the Ataribox turns out to be, would help them rise. This might very well end up to be one last hurrah for Atari too. The company has been surviving over the past few years only on some mobile phone games and licensing deals.
Atari claims that the Ataribox has been ‘years in the making’ and that it has PC technology kind of indicates that they intend to launch a device that competes with the likes of Microsoft and Sony in the console markets - which would be scary to even think of from their perspective. However, they might also be riding high on the retro wave leading to massive sales of the retro themed Nintendo consoles.
While there’s no definitive answer to what the Ataribox is and how it might affect the company, the current perception of the markets indicates that Atari might be making a mistake. Stay tuned with us for more updates on the Ataribox.
