Atari announced that prototypes of the new Atari VCS will be available at this year’s Game Developers Conference, with demonstrations of the new system being put on display at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

Atari also announced that the pre-order date(s) will be revealed next month in April of 2018.

The Atari VCS was originally known as the AtariBox and was supposed to be detailed much earlier than the current unveiling taking place at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. In fact, pre-orders were originally supposed to go live back in December of 2017, with a release date scheduled for spring of 2018.

However, Michael Arzt, Atari COO of Connected Devices, explained in the press release why the company ultimately delayed pushing the system out too early, saying…

“With the Atari VCS name, we know how important it is to get everything completely right and that’s why we briefly paused an imminent launch late last year. It was a difficult decision with the countdown underway, but we weren’t willing to go forward with even one thing out of alignment. We hope that Atari’s fans appreciate our extreme attention to detail and are as excited about the Atari VCS as we are.”

The prototypes featuring the classic and modern Atari controller will be on display as prototypes at GDC 2018 between March 21st and March 22nd.

Atari hasn’t had the best of reputations in recent years, especially with the entire fiasco surrounding the crowdfund to port the mobile version of RollerCoaster Tycoon to the Nintendo Switch. The common question becomes: if Atari supposedly didn’t have the money to port RollerCoaster Tycoon to the Nintendo Switch, where are they getting the money from to produce the Atari VCS?

I suppose we’ll find out during GDC this year if Atari is serious about the new VCS game console, which will supposedly play a bunch of Atari’s older games and some newer PC games as well.