Atari VCS brings in $2 million in pre-orders

Pre-orders for the Atari VCS classic console went live on Wednesday and have so far brought in more than $2 million in pre-orders. The pre-orders went live via the crowdfunding website Indiegogo, the campaign for which still has over a month left to run before closing.

Atari was aiming to bring in around $100,000 in order to make the Atari VCS console a reality. It’s safe to say that they’ve more than met their goal in this instance, but massive success has been seen before in microconsoles, the Ouya for example, though not all have been as successful once the physical product is released.

The appeal to adult gamers who have more disposable income now than when they had all the time in the world to play video games is shown in the huge amount of money the project has already generated. However, retro consoles aren’t always a hit. The NES and SNES Classics sold so well that stock was hard to find weeks after launch, but products such as the Sinclair ZX Vega+ have still to see the light of day after the initial promise of a 2016 release date.

The Atari VCS promises not only a huge backlog of Atari games, but also a range of new features and games available for owners to play. While the console was seen at this year’s Game Developers Conference it was not seen in use playing actual games.

The current target set for the release of the Atari VCS is May 2019, putting the release window firmly in a relatively empty window in terms of new releases each year. This tactic has proved successful for certain games such as Dying Light, but whether it will help a console become more of a success remains to be seen.

The success of the campaign has already been seen, and the community around the Atari VCS will only build and grow from here. What does remain to bee seen is if Atari can deliver on the promise of what the console is capable of doing, bringing gaming classics that inspired the releases of today into the present.