Evercade's Atari Carts Are Being Discontinued

Shame there wasn't an Atari Arcade 2 before this happened.

Good reminder, have had those Lynx carts on my wishlist for a while, ordering now.

I already got the lynx and arcade collections. Skipped the 2600 games as I already got a bunch of them in Atari collections for the Switch, and most haven't aged particularly well IMO.

Less an "Evercade" and more a "Tempcade" then.

As someone with over 2 decades in the entertainment industry producing all kinds of media and selling to many distributors and licensing to countless companies I completely understand that licenses are almost always temporary (limited by time windows), and often very specific in exactly what you can do with the product/brand you've licensed. Neither is the fault of Blaze/Evercade and I am sure they always try to get the best terms they possibly can.

But as someone who deeply cares about the history and preservation of old games and keeping them alive for new and returning audiences, its very frustrating that products such as the Evercade carts can't be for sale forever, just printing a new batch each time they sell out, if there is enough demand. At least putting up pre-orders for whatever the minimum amount required to make manufacturing a batch feasible would be a great workable solution (assuming you could get the licese terms in perpetuity... no mean feat.)

New physical copies of games are always welcome in my book, I feel the same about short print run companies like Limited Run, Super Rare et al, I understand its not possible for all products to always be available so even a temporary option with a small print run is significantly better than none at all. The Evercade carts fall into this same bracket, really. Collectors of them need to basically buy each new cartridges as they become available because you never know if they will still be around in the future, and if not, prices will probably significantly rise for the few in circulation, as per the market.

However, Atari is an interesting case. We all know that basically the company as it used to exist is no longer. Its just a brand/logo that is licensed out to pretty much anyone - hense why we have SO MANY new Atari devices, not to mention random seemingly unrelated products like "Atari" hotels and "Atari" cryptocurrencies/ERC tokens etc.

However, despite how easy it seems to be to pay your way into using the Atari brand to hawk your product, seemingly the Atari games were one of the most restrictive licenses of any of the companies/brands Evercade have worked with so far. The first two collections could only be played on the handheld devices because the license doesn't allow them to be played on home devices, like the Evercade VS. This doesn't apply to any other cartridge, as far as I know. And now we are seeing the licenses for these previous carts expiring in a pretty short time window.

I wonder how many other of the cartridges are on a similar time window (I'd wager many of them) and how long each window is? In a way, I think it would help transparency for the company, and wouldn't hurt them in any way - if they made this clear via their website when launching new products. It would actually presumably drive more people to buy the cartirdges right away, incase they can't in the future, or even increase sales numbers/speed as speculative purchases for when they go out of print, like the many people who buy Limited Run games assuming they will increase in value... (I'm not saying I approve of this practice, but it would make more money for Evercade, and they are a business afterall).

Of course, the only company that Evercade has worked with so far that is MORE restrictive than Atari has been Capcom... and Taito if you include those "non-Evercade" branded but none-the-less Evercade compatible handhelds with the built in games that Blaze is selling. However, as neither of these companies even allows the games to be put on cartridge, I strongly disapprove of them working with them at all... it goes against the unique selling point and stated ethos of the brand... but that is a rant I've already had on this site several times already! 😂

@XiaoShao Would love to see this, but you know the best game for the system (Aliens vs Predator) would not be included. But would love to see Tempest 2000 and Ruiner Pinball, etc. My brother was one of the few people who bought the system at (or near) launch, so I do have some fond memories.

@XiaoShao It was mostly really bad, but that can be fun, too. It was the first console I saw Myst on, and that really did blow my mind at the time.

@no_donatello Wow, really? Are you sure that it was a Jaguar and not another "failed" console of the era like the 3dO or CDi? Or your brother had a Jaguar but you experienced Myst on a something else your family owned like a PC/Mac/Playstation etc?

Its just that Myst was only on the Jaguar CD upgrade which is estimated to only have around 20k units sold to retaillers, and how many of them actually ended up in consumers hands is debatable... and the failure rate was extremely high so the handful of people who bought them often returned them. Add to the fact that barely any games were produced and barely any retailers sold them...

I'm not saying you're wrong, its perfectly possible your brother bought a Jag CD back in the day! Its just if so, you both had an extremely rare experience. I'm actually kinda jealous, I was excited reading about the system in magazines back in 93-94 and always wanted to own one, but never saw one in the wild.

@samuelvictor Yeah, my brother went all-in on the Jaguar and bought the CD as well. I want to say it actually came with Myst and Blue Lightning. He also had a game called Vid Grid, I think, where music videos were divided into squares and scrambled and you had to move them around to make the video display correctly. Less a game and more showing off the fact it could play full motion video, but, admittedly, I was impressed! He also had a Highlander game that was maybe just a demo... It was really bad, and I don't know if it ever released the full game.

As far as I know, his Jag CD still works. You need to place a book on it to keep the drive door closed, but not the biggest deal.

@no_donatello Wow that's really cool! Yes Blue Lightning was the pack-in game. IIRC it was made by a British programmer/studio, who also made Cybermorph, which was the pack-in for the Jag! I hope they were paid very well! Though even if not, they at least know they made the 2 games that literally everybody who owned the Jag and CD played, so that's pretty neat.

I remember Vid Grid too, it was released on PC-CD first... I think it was the first or one of the first games to use "Video for Windows", the codec Microsoft was pushing that would allow smooth fullscreen videos on Windows PCs. I remember it being covered quite heavily by some PC magazines at the time. A record label was attached to it so the music and music video clips were actual decent stuff instead of cheap licensed stock clips or public domain stuff like most "interactive media" shovelware of the time.

That Highlander game was very similar to Alone in the Dark in its presentation, from what I remember. I've never played it but I remember seeing previews of it and being interested because it was based on the animated series not the films, and I liked that show. I think it did get a full release, though I may be wrong. The Jag CD only got a handful of retail releases and many of the games I saw previews for were scrapped or moved to other consoles.

Its really cool that he's still got it and it still works! It must be one of a very small handful of units still functioning. I think possibly the reason the lasers tend to burn out very quickly is that the discs aren't stadard CD-roms but are formatted to hold more data, something like 800mb. This would mean the laser is working extra hard, but also there is less room for error correction. Put those two together and you have read errors a plenty as soon as the laser starts getting tired or if the output from the factory wasn't 100%. Your brother got very lucky!

@samuelvictor I remember Cybermorph! "Where did you learn to fly?" is seared into my mind forever.

@no_donatello hahahah yes that's the one! I actually think if you take the time to learn to play it properly its not as terrible as people make out. And you only hear that sound effect if you crash into something.... which admittedly happens a LOT until you get used to it. Most people get so infuriated by that single soundbite they never put in the time to actually "learn to fly" 😂

@XiaoShao I agree! I was thrilled when they announced the Lynx carts because that's a console I never experienced. And sure, emulation can give you access to everything, but owning an officially licensed version somehow makes it feel more worth my time.

And the Jaguar should be experienced by more people. Almost all of its polygon-based games are bad but in a formative years of 3D, "we have no idea what we're doing" kind of way that makes them interesting. And some of them are genuinely fun.

@XiaoShao Thank you! I agree with @no_donatello's summary of the Jag library, btw. For me, it's one of the weakest of that "mid" generation and the bad stuff is really embarrassingly bad, but there are some real gems too, and some fun to be had with the "quite good but not system sellers" portion of the library.

That whole section of gaming history is the most fascinating to me with the many failed systems all trying different things and having different strengths and weaknesses. On paper at least the Jaguar was one of the most exciting and capable bits of hardware. The main problem was it was extremely difficult to programme for, but included a motorola 68000 processor just intended as a backup for minor jobs supporting the more powerful chips... but as every dev team was familiar with that (basis of the Genesis, Amiga, ST, CPS1 etc!) they defaulted to using it, so this super powerful hardware just ended up with a lot of 16bit esque games that made the system look far weaker than it was. I don't think it's true power was ever really used.

If you haven't seen it, Game Sack on YT just did a fun "3dO vs Jaguar vs 32X" video which really shows the best of all 3 of those systems... even if as a Sega fan I'm salty about Joe's final conclusion! 😤 lol

You mentioned the CDi, and that's not in that video, principally I imagine because there aren't enough "real" games to have made it worthwhile talking about. For many years I thought there wasn't a game on the platform that I liked. But then I played "The Apprentice", which is excellent and I'd highly recommend. I'm always happy to find genuinely good games on these failed systems that were so ridiculously expensive and seemingly full of promise to my young mind but all failed and left the market before I could realistically afford them.

I love my Evercade, but Atari 50 is a significantly better way to go than these collections. No big loss here. Except maybe the Lynx collections-sorry to see those go. At least I already own ‘em.