The Atari VCS system will soon complete its long journey to launch, as Atari yesterday announced a June 15 retail release for the hardware.
The VCS was originally announced in June of 2017, shortly after the NES Classic sparked a wave of interest in retro gaming hardware.
At the time, the project was called the Ataribox and billed as years in the making and coming soon.
But before the system could launch, the chief architect on the project resigned, saying Atari hadn t paid him for more than six months.
Atari reassured people that it was deep in the final stages of pre-production on the VCS in November of 2019, with a planned March 2020 release window. But by the time March rolled around, Atari was just putting its first dev kits together and warning that the just-declared COVID-19 pandemic could push the system s arrival back even further.