Atari VCS First Impressions

Hello team! It was Christmas just a few days ago, and I got a cool new present from Santa, an Atari VCS. Check it out!

Going Retro!

Lemme just do my best to quickly catch you up on the world of Atari VCS in case you have no idea what that is. A couple years ago Atari released a modern console that plays the Atari retro games you came to know and love back in the 70's and 80's in a brand new expensive package that includes an exclusive game shop, a few streaming video services, and even a blank slate PC Mode. It's Linux based, and it comes with an updated classic joystick controller, a more modern controller, and a free series of games known as the Atari VCS Vault.

Now for the bad news . . . just on the 20th of December (8 days ago as of writing this post), Atari provided a statement to Tom's Hardware that sounded troubling. Basically they stopped manufacturing the VCS with their current partner, but Atari swears up and down that they are committed to keep the VCS platform software chugging along. The best guess here is that the early adopters of the Atari VCS that accounted for a 2.44 million dollar hardware revenue in 2021 have fizzled out, and last year they only made $212,466 in hardware sales. That's a big drop in sales. (Honestly, the sticker shock of paying $250 plus for a newfangled trip down memory lane has got to be the big stopping point for many people.)

Over the past three days I've had a chance to dabble a bit with my new VCS and have some initial impressions and stories that I wanted to share.

Day 1

My first experience (after downloading updates and whatnot) was loading up the Atari VCS Vault and playing a few of the old classic stand up arcade games that they featured . . . and it was awful. I mean it. The classic joystick controller they give you is actually pretty cool -- they've tied a paddle controller function to the joystick so you can rotate it like a paddle, but even after turning the sensitivity down, it was still bad. This was exactly the same for all the games that would have traditionally required a paddle controller. 

Trying to turn the sensitivity down is an adventure unto itself

Side note: The VCS can't take screenshots . . . so . . . camera photos it is . . .

Atari likely knows this and simply doesn't care, but MAN . . . that's a really bad first impression to provide me with a classic game alongside a poor play experience.

Day 2

On my second day of the VCS, I dove back in to give it another shot and reloaded the Atari VCS Vault app after I read somewhere on the Internet that there were a lot more games in the vault than I realized.  You're actually able to go down a level from the classic arcade game cabinets and play a slew of classic Atari games.  It's just a menu selection down. (My bad for not reading the line of text at the bottom of the screen)

Adventures of the Atari VCS Vault

Now we were talking.  The classic Atari games really played well with both of the controllers, and it was an absolute blast down memory lane.

My favorite comment was from my youngest who was watching me play Slot Machine (an Atari game I never got to play with as a kid), "Imagine coming home from school and this was the game you were looking forward to playing."  It's got such bad graphics. LOL. On the other hand, I had a chance to talk to him about slot machines and how they work. By the end of the play session he was cheering me on while I went on a losing streak that amounted to losing 300 bucks of game money while trying to hit the jackpot. 

He then got in on the action and played against me in the classic Atari games of Basketball, Bowling, and Combat.  Good times.

Day 3

The VCS comes bundled with a game streaming app called Antstream.  You can download this app on to your phone by the way. You don't need a VCS to play, but the controls on phone are really lacking. 

It's all about the challenges! The Pac-man challenges that is!

Antstream asks you to subscribe, but you can play for free until your gems run out.  A little tip here. Don't use Facebook to log in to Antstream if you're also going to use it to login on Atari--also, don't use the number sign as a part of your password . . . for some reason the Antstream keyboard doesn't have a number sign.  

Anyway, with Antstream you can play "challenges" that give a new twist to classic games . . . things like, get a high score in Pac-man using only one life or play Pac-man with power dots disabled and see how high you can score.  Your score earns you a medal and a placement on the leaderboards.

So there you have it.  That's my first experiences with the Atari VCS. It's a quirky little machine that's probably being discontinued. You have to struggle a bit to use it, it doesn't take screenshots, and has some weirdness to it, but once you figure it out, there is actually fun to be had there.

Up next for me with the Atari VCS is actually buying some of the weird games they have for sale in their Atari game store for the VCS. There's some cheap games in there that look pretty fun. 

Happy Dueling!