https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retro-vgs#/story

I find the idea interesting, even if I own a handful of real vintage consoles already.

But a new console - done vintage-style...with new games released for it...that's tempting.

:o)

What do you think?

Atari Jaguar? Damn they must have made a lot of those cases.

Ouya.

:^)

Seems neat. Not sure how they will pull off a "never patch" "never update" kind of thing though. Even old games had bugs. Unfortunately I already have all my retro gaming needs met via emulation with my PC connected to my TV.

None the less, I will certainly keep an eye out for youtube reviews once it's released. Much of my retro gaming is done on portable devices though such as my android.

Also, I think it's going to be hard to convince newer generation gamers to part with $299 for a retro gaming system. Unless those gamers have gamer parents also.

Still, I always like seeing these devices. Thanks for the find. =)

Calling it now: This thing is doomed.

It's a kinda cute idea, I guess, but has too many downsides and a very limited potential customer base.

I don't need a retro console, because I already have one which plays all the games, both old and new, with tons of extra features and convenience -- my PC.

I can already imagine AVGN having a tantrum for them having chosen the worst cartrigde of them all, the Jagwar style cartrigde with no backsticker. :^)

No, the more I think about it the more I see they're making a big mistake, having no online connection in this day and age for connecting to a store to download games and such, because how do they think they're going to sell games in places where there are no gamestores anymore, by mailorder? That means it can take weeks before you get your game.
And what FoxbodyMustang said, no game ever is bugfree, so the option to patch is also killed or at least made prohibitively expensive with cartrigdes.

Better, they have the molds! >:D

Looks nice but for the same amount of money (and plenty free time) one can build an arcade cabinet, complete with heavy duty joysticks & buttons (x2 for some sweet 2 player sessions), speakers, coin mechanisms (for the absolute devotees!), a frontend for managing the games etc. Talk about retro! :-)

As a retro console enthusiast this looks promising.

Their biggest problem isn't going to be the manufacturing or the hardware, though. It's going to be getting developers on board, with decent games that people actually want to play.

Fantastic idea, but I don't see it taking off. Certainly not for the price tag. I hope I'm wrong. The target audience has long ago found ways to play their classics. At first on the PC and eventually hacking the original XBOX and even the Wii. Some really talented folks created incredibly polished emulators for them. Of course, this is largely piracy. Which is bad, mmkay? However when the companies, physical titles and means to play are simply gone or extremely expensive one can only give in or give up. This is not to say I think his vision is fruitless, in fact I admire and enjoy knowing that there are places out there (GOG) that have worked hard to give folks the opportunity to own a lasting and legit copy of our lost titles.

Best of luck to the man!

What a fun concept.

They seem to be vastly overestimating the potential appeal of their product, though. 300 dollars for a retro gaming machine? You can pick up a used SNES/Genesis (or Mega Drive for you silly non-NA people) and a bunch of games for much less than that. I even picked up a Dreamcast and a couple games for 30 bucks a few years back. Besides which, there are already a million possible ways to play retro games that don't require spending 300 dollars, so I can't see this doing anything other than crashing and burning. There's just no compelling reason for this to exist.

Okay, so just to make sure we're clear on this (because the IGG page wasn't too clear at all), this is a completely new platform? With completely new games? As we've seen with OUYA, that's a tall order when the gaming landscape has already, for the most part, stablized and matured, with the main players having already defined the market.

The plus side is that the rVGS already seems to have had a definite market and niche carved out for itself (apparently the "Retro Indie" crowd that's given us games like Pier Solar, Shovel Knight and Freedom Planet). Unlike OUYA, which had apparently tried to take on Apple, MS, Sony and Nintendo in the gaming space.

The flipside to that is that in catering to a niche market, you need to be prepared to tailor your business plan to account for account for how much that will cost you given the high cost of developing and manufacturing your own hardware. Using the Jaguar molds will help alleviate that issue, but it doesn't elminate it entirely.

No.

it is ouya in different case and with lack of features ouya had.

Ouya was pointless. there is no need for that system. This one is more expensive, has even less features,

So no. While I can't tell you how to spend your money, it is your business but it will be a waste.



With smart phone you can play old games already easily. On TV with a controller. And 300 dollars buys you nice smartphone which will do the job just fine.

It's specifically the inability to patch that attracts me here, because online patching functionality has caused a lot of developers to become extremely lazy about QA, or worse still, to release games with promised patches that have never materialised.

Of course, games did get released with bugs even back then, but never with the game-breakers that you see today.

Unfortunately though, the only platform operator that exercises any proper quality control with its licensing platform is Nintendo. On the other side of the fence, Sony, Microsoft, Valve and even GOG are quite happy to let games through in an almost unusable state.

The optimum would be an extensive QA procedure with a post-patching service for minor bugs, but that of course tends to result in petty squabbles between the QA and development teams. Retro consoles provided a sort of natural balance - if games had game-breaking bugs, the cartridges would have to be returned and rebuilt, incurring massive costs, so it was always in the interest of the publisher to release a working product.

Nice idea, steep price and looks like a toilet seat...stick with emulators.