Atari to begin consumer sales of VCS console in US on June 15

Atari will begin selling the Atari VCS retro console to US consumers on June 15. The console was announced in 2017 and was initially set to release a year later. The Indiegogo backers got their console in December.

The Atari VCS console will be available for purchase from June 15 through retail stores and Atari’s own VCS website. There is no mention of an international release. The console costs 298 euros including VAT. A bundle with a classic and modern controller costs 397 euros converted with VAT.

The console comes with 100 arcade and Atari 2600 games, free access to game streaming platform Antstream Arcade and a minimum of twelve indie games. Consumers can also purchase additional games through the Atari VCS store.

Inside the Atari VCS is a 14nm AMD Ryzen Embedded R1606G apu with two Zen cores and a Vega 3 GPU, 8GB upgradable DDR4 memory and 32GB eMMC storage. Users can increase the storage capacity via the internal M.2 slot or with an external hard drive. The console supports Wi-Fi 4, Bluetooth 4, has an HDMI 2.0 port, an Ethernet port and four USB 3.1 ports. Two of these are at the front and two at the rear.

The VCS’s Linux-based operating system has a Chrome browser, supports Google’s Workspace apps, and works with “media streaming services.” In addition, users can view content in 4k, 60fps and with HDR, says Atari. In addition to its own operating system, the VCS can run a second operating system such as Windows or Linux.

Atari presented the console in 2018 after saying it was working on it a year earlier. The console was initially called Ataribox, this was changed to Atari VCS. In that year, the company said it could deliver the console in the spring of 2019. This was postponed several times, for example because the company decided to use a different apu.