Atari VCS will finally start shipping in June, but only to the first 500 backers

The Atari VCS launched with considerable fanfare nearly two years ago with the promise that orders would ship following the completion of its successful Indigogo campaign. Fast forward two years and the team behind the retro looking, but completely updated hardware is still to ship the console following a series of delays. Today, however, the Atari has posted an update to say that the first 500 units will be produced in June, which will be a relief to the first 500 customers.

However, Atari has over 11,500 backers, leaving the next 11,000 customers who pre-ordered the console with an additional wait. The good news for those customers is that Atari estimates that it will have all the components it needs to get the console in the hands of these customers this summer. Although not quite an example of a crowd-funded product gone wrong, it does highlight that for various reasons, these technical projects can be more difficult to bring to fruition than anyone anticipates.

As a refresher, the Atari VCS is currently up for pre-order (for anyone game) for US$389. That will get you a VCS 400 console with AMD Raven Ridge 2 APU, 4 GB of (upgradeable) DDR4 RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage. It also comes with a Classic Joystick and a modern controller. The slightly more expensive VCS 800 model comes with 8 GB of DDR4 (also upgradeable) RAM as standard. The console also offers the ability to boot from an external drive into Windows 10, Steam OS or Chrome OS. The base system used for running native games is a custom Linux variant.