Ataribox Becomes Atari VCS With New Pre-Order Details
The Ataribox has been fascinating gamers ever since it was first announced. Seemingly part retro console and part modern platform, the Ataribox is still shrouded in mystery. We appear to be getting closer to the date that Atari will give the system an official reveal, as today, it's been given a proper name: Atari VCS.
Atari has the VCS on-hand this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where it's also revealing the two controllers that will be available with the system. You can see these controllers below – one modeled after modern gamepads and another that takes the form of the classic Atari joystick. Something for everyone, in other words, with the joystick becoming a necessary component of the system when you consider that the VCS will play retro Atari games.
In addition to revealing the console's name and giving us a look at its controllers, Atari also announced more news for next month. Sometime in April, Atari will reveal a pre-order date for the VCS, something that was supposed to arrive in December but was delayed at the last minute. Keep in mind that Atari isn't necessarily opening pre-orders in April, merely that it will be revealing a pre-order date sometime within the month.
That, by extension, means that release could be any amount of time away. The hope is that all of this becomes clearer when Atari makes its April announcement – not only when we can expect the console to actually launch, but also solid details about what the console will do. At this point, we know the Atari VCS will be built around a custom Radeon GPU and will be capable of running Linux, but other than that, there's a lot that's still up in the air.
Hopefully the capabilities and purpose of the VCS become a little more clear next month. In the meantime, check out the images and the logo that Atari shared today and then head down to the comments section to let us know what you think of the Atari VCS – are you excited, or do you need to know more about Atari's return to the console world?