Celebrating One Year as an Atari VCS Developer
My Experience developing on the Atari VCS and my interactions with Atari and it's community
Here’s my video version, but I’ll explain things in more detail here.
Back in 2023, I had launched my first commercial indie game “Popcorn Rocket” on the PC and PlayStation 5. At the start of 2024, I launched on the Xbox One/Series.
I made some decent money on the PlayStation 5 and PC, but I had an even more incredible stellar launch on the Xbox thanks to Xbox President Sarah Bond promoting the game on X/Twitter which led to massive sales.
I had also applied to become a Nintendo Developer in 2023 to release on the Switch, but got rejected 3 times. I thought with the buzz that my game was getting thanks to Xbox and Sarah Bond, that would help my game look more convincing to Nintendo to finally become a developer for the Switch. I sent off my 4th attempt to Nintendo and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, even with the blessing of Xbox (who is technically across the street from Nintendo up in Washington State), I received my 4th rejection a few weeks later.
Spoiler: I was eventually accepted as a Nintendo Developer in August 2024 on my 6th attempt and launched on the Switch on November 2024.
I was incredibly down in the dumps about it, but somehow, the stars and the universe aligned in my YouTube recommendations as I was recommended this video by Treefall Studios talking about the Atari VCS:
”Developers are Sleeping on the Atari VCS” by Treefall Studios: Check Out Their Channel!
My History with Atari
I was born in 1981 and while Atari was still around, I grew up more with the NES. The older kids at school would say that the Atari 2600 was the console they played before the NES. I started looking up Atari when I had internet access as a teen in 1996 and I didn’t actually get to play an Atari 2600 until 2002 when I went to a convention.
Growing up, Nintendo had overtaken the market and I only remember seeing the Atari Lynx as no stores around me had the 2600, 5200, or the 7800. Surprisingly, I never saw the Atari Jaguar in stores and didn’t even get to see one in person until 2007.
I had played many Atari games over the years on emulation, including the infamous E.T. and on their various compilations. I watched a ton of reviews and retrospectives on Atari and it’s games on YouTube and read about them endlessly on Wikipedia and other sites. Like most people, the most fascinating subject I would read about Atari would be the Video Game Crash of 1983 and the supposed E.T. cartridge burial which was covered in the 2014 documentary “Atari: Game Over” (which one of my friends did the onsite boom mic capture for).
Back when the Atari VCS was known as the “Ataribox”, my old crew and I did a podcast about it. I initially didn’t have any interest in it at first after witnessing the disaster of the Coleco Chameleon and the Intellivision Amico. However, Atari was able to get the Ataribox, now called the “Atari VCS” crowdfunded and released in 2020 to it’s backers.
In 2022, I had just purchased and unlocked everything in the excellent compilation: “Atari 50”, which sparked my interest in Atari and it’s history even more. I very highly recommend this game to everyone, especially to Atari fans and newer fans who are curious about their history.
Becoming an Atari VCS Developer
Unlike the rest of the consoles, the procedure for becoming an Atari VCS developer was not as straightforward. The most I could find was this page, but I was told to approach Atari through their Atari VCS Discord (Now the Atari Club)
I showed Popcorn Rocket to the Atari VCS Discord and everyone told me that it looked like a great fit for Atari. The discord members recommended that I talk to David Paige, aka “davpa” who works for the Business Development side of Atari. After pitching my game and few more email exchanges, I got into a call with David and we hit it off pretty well like it was job interview and I was accepted onto the Atari Developer Program.
Atari VCS Porting Woes
Atari was kind enough to send me an Atari VCS to use as a dev kit as any VCS can be turned into a dev kit to make games. However, I use Game Maker Studio and not one of the more well known engines like Unity, Unreal, or Godot, so my native controller code wasn’t working with the Atari VCS. The Atari VCS uses a linux based operating system called debian, so the closest operating system I had to use for testing was Ubuntu. I repurposed an old laptop to be my Ubuntu machine for testing as using a virtual machine was too slow.
Luckily, I found a solution thanks to Lost Astronaut’s Input Candy Plugin for Game Maker which made all of my Game Maker Studio controller code for Popcorn Rocket work on the Atari VCS.
I was ready to launch on the Atari VCS as far back as February 2024 until the game just randomly kept freezing for no reason. During this time, Atari’s and Game Maker’s runtime updates were not playing well with each other which caused issues. My friends from Ettinsoft who were also Game Maker developers were able to launch their awesome game “Circus Interstellar (Xbox link)” only because they reverted back to an older Game Maker runtime. The freezes for Popcorn Rocket came at random times whether I was playing for 15 minutes, an hour, and sometimes after 2 minutes.
David and I agreed that Popcorn Rocket wouldn’t be able to launch on the Atari VCS at the state it was in at that moment, so I decided to put more effort into the PlayStation 4 port instead.
Luckily, by June of 2024, Game Maker and Atari’s updates finally started to play well with each other and David and I were able to play Popcorn Rocket on the Atari VCS with no issues. I was finally able to launch on the Atari VCS on July 12, 2024.
Release Postmortem
I was very surprised to see how well Popcorn Rocket did on the Atari VCS in it’s first 3 months. While I can’t give out exact sales numbers due to NDAs, I can gladly say that I earned enough from Popcorn Rocket on the Atari VCS to afford an Atari Jaguar, the Jaguar CD, and several games at current eBay prices. I didn’t exactly spend the money on the Atari Jaguar (yet), but that’s kind of the ballpark I earned on the Atari VCS after 3 months. It’s not “quit my day job” money, but impressive enough money as a small indie developer.
More games have been released on the Atari VCS since then and Popcorn Rocket’s visibility has been bumped way down on the VCS storefront. However, I’m still earning a decent amount of money per month even a year later as the VCS store is small with a bit over 200 games at the time of this writing which makes it easier for customers to browse.
I was also able to make a lot more money during 2024’s Black Friday sales when the Atari VCS was on sale for about $99 and I even bought myself a 2nd one just to use as a dedicated dev kit while my original VCS is now used to play games.
Some fans are a bit disappointed with Atari’s supposed lack of support of the Atari VCS as current CEO Wade Rosen took over Atari after the VCS came out and wants Atari to focus on other things. I know David wants more developers to get on the Atari VCS and sadly, alot of my fellow Game Maker developers have shunned it, but it’s their loss.
The best part of my entire Atari VCS experience has been the awesome community and the Atari Club discord. They’re a pretty hardcore and chill group that loves playing new games (and are *really* obsessed with Leaderboards which I still have to figure out how to implement as a Game Maker dev). I’ve met a ton of amazing devs who have helped me quite a bit in testing Popcorn Rocket and my upcoming Indiana Jones Parody/Tribute action platformer and I’ve gotten to play so many amazing games on the Atari VCS as well.
At the time of this writing, I can’t provide a link to the Atari VCS specific port of Popcorn Rocket as you need to purchase it from the Atari VCS storefront. You can pick it up on the various other platforms and the PC if you prefer by clicking here.
I have no idea of what will be in store for the future of the Atari VCS, but I still hope I can release all of my future games on there if the storefront still remains up. One idea I have is a totally Atari inspired game down to the single color pixel graphics with a few modern additions which I would love to release first on the Atari VCS as a tribute to Atari itself. Atari has become my retro gaming addiction in the past year as I just bought an Atari 7800+ and some physical games. I’m always on the lookout for boxed Atari games and any good deals I can find (I plan to get CIB versions of E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark).
If you’re an aspiring game developer, I can totally vouch for developing on the Atari VCS as it has an awesome, chill, and dedicated community and also a not so crowded and flooded storefront filled with shovelware and AI slop games. Since the VCS is more of a niche console, you won’t be making “quit my day job” money, but you can definitely earn a decent amount to get yourself an Atari Jaguar on eBay.
Even though I grew up with the NES, I now fully understand and appreciate the impact that Atari had on the video game industry. I’ve read the excellent book by E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark game designer Howard Scott Warshaw: “Once Upon an Atari” twice on my kindle already which I highly recommend. Without Atari, we wouldn’t have the video game industry we have today.
With that said, fellow Atarians, I just have one question:
