Atari VCS console will ship in March 2020

The Atari VCS will be released in 2020 and will ship in March to those who pre-order the console. Pre-orders can be placed at some stores in the US or directly through Atari. Americans who have invested money through Indiegogo will receive their copy in December 2019.

Atari says on their official Atari VCS website that the console will ship sometime in early 2020, with US Walmart reporting, for example, that the device will arrive on March 24. The team behind the Atari VCS confirm on Indiegogo that it will be delivered in March next year. With that, the crowdfunding campaign on that platform has come to an end; the counter stands at more than three million dollars.

There are several versions of the console coming out. For example, customers get a version with 4GB of ram, the VCS 400, for $250. There is also the VCS 800 that has 8GB of ram. These versions come without the accompanying gamepad and joystick, which cost $60 and $50 respectively. Atari is also releasing a package containing the VCS 800, gamepad, and joystick for a total of $390. Whether the console will also be available in Europe from March 2020 and for what euro price is unknown.

The console contains the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 soc, with which a Vega 3 GPU and a Zen CPU architecture do the calculations. This makes it possible, according to Atari, to play content in 4k resolutions combined with 60 images per second and HDR. Atari is one of the first parties to implement this soc with their VCS console. Furthermore, the amount of storage space can be expanded and Bluetooth 5.0, USB 3.0, WiFi and an Ethernet connection are available.

In fact, the Atari VCS is a Linux PC that contains over a hundred retro Atari games, such as Missile Command and Pong, although new games will be released for the console as well. The VCS also supports a sandbox mode, so any OS can be put on the device.