By Nelson Schneider - 10/19/25 at 12:46 AM CT
Remember a couple years ago when Atari (delenda est) – the terrible videogame publisher that directly caused the 1983 console gaming crash – decided that the thing the world really needed was a crappy Android-powered Ouya clone shaped like an Atari 2600 console, preloaded with a library of ROMs for games so bad they aren’t even worth the few megabytes of space the entire collection occupies in an Emulator folder? Yeah, that was fun, and the failure of the Atari VCS soon lead the pathetic, shambling corpse of one of Gaming’s worst villains to dabble in creating their own cryptocurrency casino. That was even more fun.
Of course, you can’t keep a good terrible company down, and it looks like Atari (delenda est) is trying the retro-console thing again, only this time they're puppeting the corpse of one of their biggest opponents from way back then (who went on to do literally nothing): Intellivision. Promoting their new endeavor as finally burying the hatchet from the first Console War, the two competitors are now both under the same roof... Not to mention it’s pretty easy to bury the hatchet when one competitor is dead and the other one is a zombie.
Slated to launch in December, and now open for pre-orders, the Intellivision Sprint is set to be yet another crappy emulation box styled with fake, plastic wood-grain, and accompanied by some truly abnormal retro controllers (but, hey, they’re wireless and rechargable now!). While Atari (delenda est) is being coy about whether Android or some other flavor of open-source software powers the Sprint, they have made it clear that it comes pre-loaded with a library of 45 (terrible) games (that aren’t worth playing even for a few minutes), and as icing on the cake, each built-in game has a special paper overlay to slide over the controller’s touch-tone-telephone-esque numpad to inform the player exactly what the fuck each of the buttons does for any given game.
Unlike the VCS that Atari (delenda est) targeted at “tinkerers” with promises of a fully open system, the company is completely mum about the Sprint’s expanded capabilities – if indeed there are any. But for the low, low price of $150 in this economy, the Sprint certainly couldn’t be packing very many exciting secrets or happy surprises behind it’s wood-grain and numpad-covered exterior, but I suppose we should just be glad that it doesn’t advertise itself as a crypto-casino. Of course, should you foolishly buy one of these, make sure you monitor your network traffic for any crypto-mining shenanigans.
