They got $1M from the German government to spend on German developers.
Lending some credence to it all being a scam, an indie dev actually interested in Amico never got a response:
Sorry to get you riled up @jpinard
Despite a guarantee of getting a response from the superstar video game celebrity himself, I don’t recommend engaging him on AtariAge if you choose to read the thread there. It’s his safe space where his cult congregates. No, this is not reverse psychology.
I fully expect their solution to be some kind of NFT/blockchain bullshit.
You think they’re that qualified in terms of technical expertise? All their “600 years of videogames experience” are a bunch of graybeards from before the Great Crash. They couldn’t secure their developer portal.
This used to have claims about its 2D prowess capable of 2D processing that PS5 and Xbox were incapable of matching but it was edited out:
You know what they say: bury the bad news late on Friday.
The team at Intellivision has been working tirelessly to bring Amico – our family-focused entertainment system – to eager households around the world. We’ve grown to a strong and stable company of more than 60 passionate team members spanning three continents, representing some of the industry’s best talent. All of us are extremely excited to share Amico with you.
We originally planned to launch Amico in the Fall of 2020 but had to adapt during the midst of the global pandemic disrupting our production. Despite our best efforts, and now facing new unprecedented international component supply and logistics challenges beyond our control, we want to apologize as we are forced to push our desired launch date yet again.
In spite of these supply hurdles hampering our ability to fill all orders, we are focused and determined to deliver pre-ordered units by the end of the year. This will also allow us more time to optimize our operating system for future game development. We want to ensure that those who have anticipated the Amico for so long, get a chance to enjoy it as soon as possible. Of course, we will keep all of our customers and interested parties informed and updated on our continued progress.
Everyone at Intellivision wants to thank you, our dedicated fans and loyal followers for your enthusiasm and incredible unwavering support for Amico. As a special thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered an Amico, we will be sending out a very special thank you gift to you via e-mail next week.
We cannot wait to share with you what we’ve built - and assure you the wait will be worth it.
The Intellivision Team
This is destined to be plugged on Rush Limbaugh’s talk show alongside Carbonite and MyPillow.
I stil don’t understand the strategy of not releasing most of the games catalogue until the console ships, and what kind of physical hardware is involved with the cartridges RFID chip thing, and the console hardware.
As the email says, they’re paying for 60 employees, a physical office all for Tommy to roleplay CEO with other people’s money.
Despite his sincere nostalgic enthusiasm for the Intellivision name, I doubt they have any intention of delivering as it seems they’ve been doing everything wrong for years and show no signs of correcting their course. Using the pandemic as an excuse for the third time is low and clearly misdirection since Nintendo, Panic and even smaller players like EverCade can somehow deliver production. Two extra months won’t make a lick of difference since if they were really intent on delivering, things would be locked in at factories by now.
Tommy spends all day shitposting on Twitter and AtariAge so I can’t imagine what a real CEO would be doing in his place. Atari had less manpower (many of his hires are fresh out of school despite the misleading “600 years of industry experience” worth of “advisors” he keeps trying to name drop and many high profile executives featured in initial pitches are nowhere to be seen) and managed to deliver, albeit late. They were hiring for basic roles you would think were filled in 2018-2019 like firmware developers etc long after the initial launch date had passed last year.
Releasing a pittance of 50k boxed “somethings” is clearly a stall tactic to go out e-begging for another round of gullible investment. “Look! We have physical somethings!”
Also, note the wording of the email: “end of the year” NOT “end of this year.”
Well, it says “team members”, so I bet that includes a bunch of people who may have done an internship and any freelancer/contractor they’ve worked with, however briefly.
They have seemingly unnecessary presidents and offices in Dubai and Europe.
Unrelated:
They have not announced a new ship date but have employed a clever bit of marketing double-speak in order to manipulate the gaming news sites into citing a new ship date of “end of the year.”
When, not if, they miss the December 31/21 date, they will claim that the press made the ship date claim and not them as they were only “focused and determined” on shipping (some/any/a) unit(s).
After not posting any update to the actual investors page, he finally does so today long after last Friday’s stealth delay email, with the news of the delay all buried at the bottom after the astroturf-astrosmash videos:
Totally above board, non-shady thing to do, right?
The Intellivision execs are not below gaslighting their detractors by blaming them for a murder-suicide when it was an AtariAge poster and Amico fan Rudy Feretti who appeared together in a documentary on female gamers with Tommy.
I can’t believe how batshit insane this whole affair keeps becoming.
Of course, Tommy is now responding to the post in /r/gamingcirclejerk now too because he’s not really CEO of a consumer electronics startup that will release an actual product but has endless time all day to shitpost:
At this point, he’s like the new @dsmart ! :)
The NCAA won’t do anything about it. Or they’ll punish Mizzou.
Brilliant. :D
What do securities have to do with the NCAA?
SEC= Securities and Exchange Commission and South Eastern Conference for NCAA sports. One of the major conferences in college football especially.
