it was back when they were trying to crowdfund the absolute disaster that would turn out to be the Atari VCS, which was basically a bunch of laptop hardware shoved into a stylized case. but that's not how a lot of people saw it because they never actually looked into it. what a lot of people thought it was was just like... basically a lot of people got the idea that it was a clone console that would be able to run multiple generations of atari games
and because they never actually looked into it, they didn't see the price. there were just loads of people who assumed it was going to be like the NES Classic or the PSX Mini and the SNES Classic. finally, people would be free of the curse of AtGames!
but that's not what it was. it seemed like that because they went so far as to give it all this branding and design stuff to make it evoke the 2600/classic VCS, but they never really... established that it was an actual new console very effectively. of course, this wouldn't have helped, because when the thing was finally up for actual preorder, people started to notice en masse "hey, this thing costs like $50 less than a fucking PS4 Pro"
because the thing was fucking EXPENSIVE
it cost SO MUCH MONEY
if you were willing to buy used, you could probably get one of those actual consoles and a game. but Atari? Atari had fucking nothing and a piece of hardware that cost so much that even the enthusiast community was going "lol no." especially since the enthusiast community was already wary given its multiple delays, the whole thing with how Atari was just Infogrames wearing the brand, and pretty shady demonstrations
and oh MAN those demonstrations. for a while, people weren't even sure if the thing could fucking boot because they literally never actually showed the thing being turned on. it was hard to tell if they were actually showing the console off or if they were just running windows on it and running the games in that. and then eventually they did show it running windows as an example and oh my god it was so fucking bad. one of the demos was a fucking camcorder let's play of Call of Duty: Warzone but it was running at the lowest resolution on the lowest settings and still struggling to get to 20fps
this was their big demo. a game that could run on similarly priced hardware at dramatically worse quality. the other games they showed at this time all ran pretty similarly poorly, even if they were extremely simple games. an ongoing theory about why those demos were so bad was that the drivers simply hadn't been updated so something was wrong with the gpu, but even a lot of tests afterwards showed that they still all ran like shit in windows
the thing also just chugged when decoding any video running at a resolution greater than 1080p. like, the thing just could not handle it and even some 1080p videos would run like garbage if they were encoded in certain ways. I'm talking "you can get better performance out of a raspberry pi" in some cases. just real awful performance shit. and none of this is even touching on how the system architect and his firm hadn't been paid for six months and just left because, I mean, fuckin' yeah
also like... one of their big selling points was that it shipped with AntStream Arcade, a product that just baffles the fucking mind
"a game streaming service that supports titles from the Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and arcade games"
a fucking streaming service? for this? when streaming services basically only ever made sense for games that would struggle/fail to run on the hardware you were playing them on and even that was a mixed bag at the best of times? and you're using it for ZX Spectrum games? games that look like THIS?
and even when people did try streaming them, it was about the experience you'd expect: borderline unplayable, either from video randomly getting heavily compressed or input lag getting up to the hundreds of milliseconds, but also other issues like some games just not really properly emulating in the first place so like... what's the fucking point? my guess is that it has something to do with licensing and distribution rights? who fuckin' knows. who fuckin' cares
but to me, the thing that always sticks out is the way they completely failed to actually tell anyone what this thing fucking was. loads of people just thought it was a classic console thing but it was an actual attempt at making some real console thing and they just never conveyed this well at all. some of this was timing, that kickstarter launched right when we either had or knew about upcoming mini consoles, but so much of it was just absolutely completely fucked up and failed messaging
