The UK retailer Argos has stopped accepting preorders for the Intellivision Amico on its website (as highlighted by the video game writer Siobhán Casey on Twitter).
For those outside of the UK, Argos is one of the UK's largest retailers, selling everything from home electronics to toys to garden furniture. Despite the controversy surrounding Amico over the last few years, it was one of the last high-street stores to still be accepting preorders for the console on its website. However, it appears that is now no longer the case, with Amico's product page linking to the site's error message instead.
The page has been offline for at least 8 days at this point, with a Reddit user named u/ElGofre claiming that they may be the person responsible for Argos's decision to remove the product.
According to them, they had reached out to Argos via its question and answers section on the Amico product page, enquiring about the legitimacy of the product. Then a couple of days later, after the question was approved and posted online, Argos removed the product from sale completely.
u/ElGofre commented below the original post:
"As an on-off follower of this debacle, it surprised me to see that Argos, one of the largest retailers in the UK and arguably the last holdout of established high street retailers to originally pick up the Amico, have continued to take preorders after several years of this nonsense, answering concerns about the legitimacy of the product in their Questions section with copy-pasted assurances about release date changes being a common industry practice.
"Well, nobody had posted a question in several months and, with Snope's video kicking up the dust around this product in a big way recently, I figured I'd submit a slightly more elaborate question. And, lo and behold, a couple of days later my question was approved and posted, but the product has been entirely removed from the site."
It's not exactly encouraging news for those who still hold out hope for the device to make it to market. We've reached out to Intellivision and Argos for comment.