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Someone Donated A $10,000 Game To Goodwill

Someone Donated A $10,000 Game To Goodwill

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Usually, when you hear about auctions for extremely rare and valuable games, they’re giant gross testaments to greed and gluttony, but this one’s a bit different. This time the end result wasn’t an already-rich man stuffing a few more millions into his vault…100% of the cash went to charity. We’re not sure if the circumstances were intentional, though. Alex Juarez works at a Goodwill in North Texas, sorting donations for thrift store branches all around the area. One recent morning he was picking through a box of random toys and old knickknacks and pulled out an unusually-shaped Atari 2600 cartridge. It was bright blue, with a pull handle and a wordless painting of airplanes on its front label. Juarez was certain he’d seen the item before, but couldn’t remember where. He sent a picture of the cartridge to his father, who exclaimed “YOU FOUND AIR RAID!” Air Raid is considered by many to be the rarest Atari 2600 game ever made (though since there was no lockout chip and anyone

Iconic Atari®️ Properties are Headed to the Revolutionary Blockchain-based Gaming Metaverse, The Sandbox

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Atari® has announced a new partnership with Animoca Brands and its subsidiary TSB Gaming Ltd — the creators of the revolutionary blockchain-based gaming metaverse, The Sandbox. Hit Atari properties such as Asteroids®, Centipede®, Pong®, and RollerCoaster Tycoon® will be brought to life within the 3D voxel world of The Sandbox, an interactive virtual world that launches this year on the Ethereum blockchain. Under Atari’s partnership with Animoca Brands and TSB Gaming Ltd, 3D voxelized versions of Atari’s classic and most popular gaming properties will be made available in The Sandbox when the game launches to the public later this year. Atari-inspired “ASSETs” (persistent metaverse objects) will also be available within The Sandbox for use throughout the entire platform by players and even creators in their very own metaverse games. The Sandbox will also be home to the first Atari theme park on the blockchain — Atari LAND! This virtual creation will feature Atari-themed attractions, creations, and immersive social gaming experiences. “Given that Atari’s iconic brands introduced so many people to

Atari Turns To Wonder To Power Its VCS

Atari Turns To Wonder To Power Its VCS

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Atari revealed today that the company Wonder is building the operating system that will power its upcoming Atari VCS machine. Their WonderOS is an Android-based hybrid mobile gaming and entertainment platform. The VCS doesn’t get much coverage in gaming media, so I’m going to have to explain in full what the product is: it’s an attempted revival of the Atari Video Computer System by the company that owns the brand today (no one involved with the original is involved with this). The new Atari VCS was announced in 2017, crowdfunded via Indiegogo in 2018, and has suffered delay after delay since then. So is it a retro console that plays 2600 stuff, or is Atari brave enough to attempt muscling in on Playstation and XBox territory (or, at the least, Stadia)? It’s….kinda both. The new VCS will come preloaded with a lot of vintage ROMs, but it will also boast the specs of a modern gaming PC with 4 or 8GB of RAM (depending on the model), 4K resolution and

Arcade1Up Machines Coming To Consumers This Fall

Arcade1Up Machines Coming To Consumers This Fall

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Ask any gamer if they would like an arcade machine in their house, and they would respond with “Heck yeah.” What prohibits this from happening for most of us is the cost. An authentic roughed-up arcade unit from the Golden Age can run anyone $600 to $1000, or possibly more. If you don’t care about authenticity, there are independent contractors who make bootleg 100-in-one arcade stand-ups, but those can be pricey as well. Hobby manufacturer Tastemakers has seen the need and come to fill it — sort of. Their new officially licensed Arcade1Up cabinets will become available this fall. Each contains four classic arcade games released in their heyday by the Atari company — except for the one cabinet that includes Street Fighter II, they’re all Atari. The dedicated nature of the machines means their games are grouped by control type — Centipede, Millipede, Breakout and Missile Command comprise one machine that has a giant trackball. In order to make these affordable, something had to give. For one thing, there’s

RollerCoaster Tycoon Coming To Nintendo Switch Thanks To Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

RollerCoaster Tycoon Coming To Nintendo Switch Thanks To Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

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Atari has had something of tumultuous history in terms of finances over the last few decades. Whilst it experienced a huge boom with the explosion of arcade games it got into difficulty with the video game crash that occurred in the 1980s. Since then it has changed focus multiple times but still raised eyebrows when it launched a crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine for a port of RollerCoaster Tycoon for the Nintendo Switch. According to Fred Chesnais, the CEO of Atari Game Partners, this was not because the company needed the cash to bring the game to the new platform but rather as a way to experiment with new funding techniques. “As a financier, because I have a portfolio of 200 games, I have a broader question,” Chesnais said, “which is, ‘What is the best way from a cost of capital perspective for Atari and for me?’” “From a strategy perspective, as a publisher, we are doing this game. From a financial perspective and cost of capital perspective, it makes sense

First Look At The Mysterious “Ataribox”

First Look At The Mysterious “Ataribox”

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First things first: they’re making a video game console with woodgrain as part of the design in 2017. It’s the Ataribox, the brand’s heralded return to the game market….and we say “brand” since it is literally all that exists of the original company, having been taken down in the mid-90’s after the Jaguar flopped. The Atari name has bounced around under the ownership of different people ever since. Whoever has it now is trying to bring back its glory days to the fullest. And yet we barely know anything about the Ataribox. This is intentional. The machine was first announced last month and there weren’t even any pictures. Now we have some (which could be renderings) and a couple more questions answered, but not much else. Two models of the Ataribox are presented here: one with the woodgrain design and one with a black glass front. Both models light up in red when active. A turnaround reveals the Ataribox has four USB ports and an HDMI output. “As you can

IDW Planning Tabletop Versions Of Atari Games

IDW Planning Tabletop Versions Of Atari Games

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There have been a lot of popular properties that have had their worlds translated into tabletop form, but perhaps none more unconventional (at least within the last month) as IDW’s new partnership with Atari. Together they plan to release several new tabletop versions of classic late 70’s and early 80’s action video games, such as Centipede and Asteroids. The biggest question you have right now is the same as mine: how will this even work? IDW isn’t spilling details. They are telling us that Jon Gilmour, designer of Game of Winter, is leading a team of “hand-picked up-and-coming co-developers” to make these translations possible. “Atari is one of the hallmarks of our generation,” says Jerry Bennington, VP of New Product Development. “We’re honored with the opportunity to be able to bring the Atari classic archive to the tabletop.”  Fred Chesnais, Chief Executive Officer at Atari, adds “IDW Games has a fantastic history of bringing licensed products to market, and we’re thrilled to work out a partnership and see our classic games

Atari Poster Book Set for June

Atari Poster Book Set for June

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Dynamite Entertainment recently announced that the company is going to be releasing a special Atari Poster Book. This is a follow-up to the release of the Art of Atari book from 2016. The poster book is due out in April 2017, and it’s curated by Art of Atari author Tim Lapetino and collects iconic images from the golden age of gaming. Atari, which was first formed in 1972, became one of the most recognized video game makers and publishers in the world. Atari pioneered the gaming industry, with titles such as Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command. This will give fans another look at the artwork of Atari that inspired many and offered a bridge from the simple on-screen graphics of the early years to the imaginations of gamers. The artwork is the video game illustrated posters. According to Dynamite, the posters will be easy-to-remove and display. Speaking on the release, Lapetino said, “I’m thrilled that we are able to make the classic artwork of Atari available to fans and art aficionados in

A Pictorial Tour Of The Ultimate Video Game Museum

A Pictorial Tour Of The Ultimate Video Game Museum

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The National Videogame Museum, located in Frisco, Texas, boasts this country’s most complete collection of rare artifacts from the 30-plus year history of video games. Ars Technica was given the grand tour, and what they came back with was spectacular. This may be the best museum I’ve ever seen! Below is a small sampling of the over 100 photos AT took during their visit. Prepare to be jealous of Texas for the first time in your life. Part of the exhibit includes “authentic” recreations of the living rooms where the older games would have been played. Here we have the 70’s, with a shag carpet surrounded by woodgrain everything (including the game console). The 80’s room is also fairly accurate, even if the posters make it a bit too on the nose. If there was a 90’s room AT did not take pictures of it, but it wouldn’t have been that different. Just because they could, the NVM placed the ultra-rare, uinlicensed cartridge Chiller into the NES unit. In this

ET Landfill Auctions Generate $107,000

ET Landfill Auctions Generate $107,000

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In April of 2014, an excavation took place in Alamagordo, New Mexico….site of the former landfill that, rumor held, was the graveyard of the Atari corporation: the place where they had to bury their shame and all their bad business decisions, specifically millions of ET cartridges. The game supposedly so bad that the dump consisted of nothing but ET carts. The excavation was covered by the media and presented in the documentary Atari: Game Over a few months later (still viewable on Netflix). They discovered a half-truth: while Atari did have to bury thousands of unsold merchandise due to the collapsing video game market, and most of the blame for that collapse was on their shoulders, it wasn’t all ET carts that had been dumped. They made up a lot of the inventory, to be sure, but there were plenty of other games and peripherals that weren’t selling as fast either. After the Atari dump of legend had been dug up, the crew and the city agreed to auction off

Value Of Retro Games On The Rise

Value Of Retro Games On The Rise

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In 2003 I purchased a used Chrono Trigger in a mint condition box for $70. That’s it up there. If I had shown you this image and told you I just picked up the game today, you never would have believed me — a complete package like this is worth over $200 now. But that kind of price hike was expected. It’s the rise of just about everything else that’s caught collectors off-guard. CNN has published a report on the rapidly climbing value of retro games and the consoles they play on. What’s going on is that the generation that grew up with these games is looking for them again, and nothing but the genuine article will satisfy. All those people who sold their games at a garage sale, or gave them away in college, or had their mothers toss their collection while they were at summer camp, now have children of their own and want to share the same experiences with them. This has created a rising demand for a

New Asteroids Game Looks….Different

New Asteroids Game Looks….Different

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AINO has announced a new Asteroids game (AINO stands for “Atari In Name Only” since it’s actually a French company that purchased the name and trademark. The real Atari died in the mid-90’s) called Asteroids: Outpost. If it looks a bit different, that’s because it’s a sandbox-style survival game where you mine for resources, build bases and then defend those bases against….no, not asteroids, other players, though they promise asteroids will be involved somewhat. What this draws attention to is how fragmented the game industry has become. The supermarket game rack once contained a title to satisfy every taste and market segment — there were shooters as well as puzzlers, racers, sports games, platformers, adventure titles, RPGs and every other color in the game rainbow. As recently as the Playstation 2 and perhaps even in the beginning years of last-gen, you could release a faithful relaunch of Asteroids that was nothing but an overhead shot of a spaceship. Now if a physical release of a game that simple were to

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