What just happened? Atari over the weekend said it is about to enter the "home stretch" on its Atari VCS project. The first 500 or so consoles are expected to leave the factory by mid-June, the company said, following a slight delay involving a component that needed to be re-fabricated.
Atari officially debuted the gaming and home video computer system on Indiegogo roughly two years ago starting at $199. The first wave of units were expected to ship to early backers by the spring of 2019 but the project was met with multiple delays. At one point, the project's lead architect exited after claiming he hadn't been paid in six months.
The gaming company said over the weekend that its team has searched high and low for suppliers that can fulfill its order requirements. As such, the team anticipates having everything it needs to build systems for the 11,597 Indiegogo backers sometime this summer.
As the world got caught up in the Covid-19 pandemic, so too did Atari. The storied video game player had earmarked nearly two dozen pre-production units for press showcases and hands-on events but as virus containment measures wiped those gatherings off the calendar and forced employees to work from home, the units became stranded in Atari's New York City office and were only recently recovered and distributed to internal and VIP testers.
More information on the Atari VCS will be released as it becomes available, we're told.