A mysterious countdown timer has been added to Atari's website, teasing that "something exciting" is on the way in the world of retro gaming.
The countdown, which can be accessed from a new coming soon tab located on the website's homepage, is set to expire tomorrow (on Friday, October 17th at 12 pm BST, 7 am EDT), which is incidentally the date when Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025 is set to kick off.
The webpage offers very little in terms of clues for what the mysterious announcement could be, simply encouraging people to sign up to the company's mailing list. However, given its prominence on the site, we're expecting this to probably be a little more interesting than a set of new retro-themed t-shirts or a simple cartridge release, with the best bet (at least in our eyes) being something hardware-related.
Atari has been no stranger to releasing new hardware over the last few years, launching the Atari 2600+, Atari 7800+, Atari 400 Mini, and, more recently, the Atari Gamestation Go, in collaboration with companies like Plaion and MyArcade.
While we were not overly impressed with the Atari Gamestation Go in our recent review, and felt that the Atari 7800+ was nice yet slightly redundant, we had a huge soft spot for the 2600+ and welcomed the launch of the 400 Mini, which we described at the time as a "deep cut, but a welcome one". As a result, we'd certainly be interested in seeing the company update more of its classic hardware.
Could we be seeing the company revisiting some of its other hardware from the past, like the Atari Lynx, Atari ST, or Jaguar? Well, you'll just have to join us tomorrow to see.