Xbox architect sues Atari over unpaid work on crowdfunded console

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  The $250 base system (with 4GB of RAM) doesn't include either of these two controllers.

Rob Wyatt, perhaps best known as the system architect on Microsoft's original Xbox, has filed a lawsuit against Atari Gamebox LLC. The suit, filed in a federal court in Colorado, alleges that the company has failed to pay Wyatt and his firm Tin Giant nearly $262,000 invoiced for work on the long-delayed Atari VCS microconsole.

The project now known as the Atari VCS was first announced as Ataribox back in 2017, and it was originally targeting a spring 2018 launch. But despite a $3 million IndieGogo campaign in 2018, Atari's hybrid PC/microconsole has since limped through production pauses and delays over the months. Most recently, the company wrote that supply chain issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic may delay a planned March 2020 rollout to initial backers and pre-orderers.

Wyatt says in his lawsuit that he and Tin Giant have been unfairly defamed as "scapegoats" for these development troubles to the press. "The fact that Atari's Console Project was or is delayed has nothing to do with the quality of Tin Giant's work but is the fault of Atari's own mismanagement of the Console Project," Wyatt alleges in his suit. "The architecture being used by Atari on the Console Project is exactly what Plaintiffs designed under the Agreement."

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