Posted in: Games | Tagged:

Cancelling the Atari Gameband – What's Next?

Published Sun, 02 Dec 2018 06:50:38 -0600

Peter G writes,

Atari has been in the news quite a bit over the past couple of years, and not always for the best reasons. It stems primarily from their reliance on crowdfunding to launch their products. Things were off to an iffy start with the Atari Gameband, a basic smartwatch that would come with Atari games like Pong, which was shown In their promotional video (Atari claims they pulled the license from FMTwo Games, so it's all in their hands now). They also crowdfunded a port of Roller Coaster Tycoon Adventures for the Nintendo Switch. There was a portable Atari 2600 similar to the Flashback handhelds made by AtGames.

And, of course, the Atari VCS, a.k.a. the Atari box.

Atari has a slew of defenders who will step up and white knight for the company, ready to flood message boards and article comments. So let me just take a moment to say, "Hi, gang!"

Now, Atari has made good on a couple of these things. Roller Coaster Tycoon Adventures for the Switch is being listed as ready for release in a week or two — we don't know exactly what the game will be like, but it is definitely coming, so that one worked out. The portable Atari 2600 is also available for sale now from UK mail order companies (I haven't seen it in the wild here in America), so that does exist and has come out.

But those are just small things. The two biggies people associate with Atari are the Gameband and the VCS.

And the Gameband is cancelled.

Not just cancelled — no backers are being refunded.

The Gameband was launched with excitement and the aim of getting $75,000 on Kickstarter. It made that in a single day. It would eventually get $325,996 in pledges, with the Gameband still being offered for sale afterwards. That was in July of 2016.

Since then, FMTwo Games got Atari on board and Re-Logic, the indie darlings behind Terraria. This brought the project's funding up to $500,000. It was supposed to ship in October 2017. But other than occasional updates and vague reassurances to Kickstarter backers, nothing has materialized. The last update to the Kickstarter page was on April 21 with the headline, "Still alive and kicking!" Although it was unclear how — the update mentioned having to come up with a new plan with their production partners.

During this time, Atari pulled their license from FMTwo Games and publicly distanced themselves. This raised questions about the development of the Gameband, since no one knew what this meant for games included with the device. No comment came. (Feargal Mac Conuladh, the CEO of FMTwo Games, was also helping develop the Atari VCS. He was canned from the project about this time.). For the past couple of months, Re-Logic has heard nothing and when fans asked them, all they could say was they were in the dark, too. Ted Murphy, Re-Logic's head of business strategy and marketing, told Variety that they hadn't received any financial compensation for the product.

And then, the silence ended. Conuladh issued on update on Kickstarter available only to backers. And he said the Gameband project was officially cancelled.

"Ultimately the time, cost, and complexity have turned out to be far more challenging than we expected, and as a startup we simply do not have the finances or resources to continue to forge ahead. We have looked at it from many angles, met with new potential partners, and tried to find additional funding to keep going, however we have not be able to make progress."

Which brings up the obvious question of refunds. But remember, once a Kickstarter is successful, the money belongs to the campaign organizers, and they can do whatever they like with it (anyone else remember Yogventures?). Will there be refunds? Conuladh addressed that by saying they "will do our utmost to do so, and in fact we are determined to do so if and when we can. For now that is not the case. Our costs have far exceeded the $500k to date as we have dealt with delays and technical challenges." So it looks like the answer is probably going to be, "No."

Now, like I said, two of Atari's other projects are either coming or have already gotten out. But what does this mean for the Atari box, especially given Conuladh's involvement with Atari and its development of the console?

It's going to be a scary time to find out.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!