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Atlantis, something better than piracy

Atlantis was a startup that never got past its pitch deck. The idea: a legal way to play the classic console games, on whatever screen you have, without buying an old console and a cartridge on eBay. In early 2020 it went through an incubator programme, and on this day there was a check-in where the deck was picked apart. My side of the call survives because the Zoom chat was saved, and one line from it is the whole pitch:

How come I cannot Play a massively popular game like secret of mana on my TV even though I am willing to pay for it?

A few minutes later the line that ended up on a slide:

it's really not something that happens because piracy is so hard to kill. Like Daniel Ek said "the only way is to create something better than piracy"

A TV interface mockup: a dark sidebar with the Atlantis logo, a user avatar and icons for home, favourites, search and profile. Across the top: CONNECTION QUALITY: EXCELLENT, CONTROLLER: CONNECTED. The background is the overhead map of Hyrule Castle from A Link to the Past, and over it the title, HOURS PLAYED 25 Hours, LAST PLAYED March 11th 2020. A row headed Action RPG shows the title cards of A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Tetris
The TV version, an Adobe XD mockup. Connection quality and the controller sit at the top; lag is the complaint the notes keep making about everyone else.

What it was supposed to be

Most of the folder is notes, and they argue with themselves. The plain version was "Netflix for 90s videogames", as an outreach letter from March put it: emulators on phones, PCs and in browsers, one monthly price. The notes doubt the flat rate:

As I browse some of the competition.... jam.gg or Anstream ... I can't help but think that they suck and this idea of a retro games subscription makes 0 sense. I don't want that, especially if there are no major flagship titles. MUCH better would be a platform where I can pay to play or pay to own a retro game in the cloud and I mean ANY retro game, especially SNES ones.

The case for it was the games you cannot get. The list of "the hardest yet most appreciated retro games to play legally" starts with "Earthbound: 400$" and then never gets a second price. One way around the licences was a rack of real consoles in a cooled room, each with a cartridge in it, streamed to whoever rented it:

retro cloud: let people buy hardware and cartridges without ever having to manage them in their own household. We set up the streaming and everything for you with a center on each continent. Basically, you buy the stuff and pay us to keep it running and when you don't use it, you don't pay!

A web page mockup: the Atlantis logo, a blue triangle over the word ATLANTIS, top left; navigation Home, Platforms, Games. On the left the A Link to the Past logo, five stars, Action RPG | 1991 and a paragraph of lorem ipsum. On the right the castle map from the game, and along the bottom the title cards of Super Mario 64, A Link to the Past and Super Mario World
The web version, from the pitch deck folder, 19 March. The description is still lorem ipsum.

The check-in

The notes from that call read like a list of everything that was missing. The feedback: "too much time on memory lane", "merge the two competition slides", "how many users does antstream or stadia have". The one marked as the elephant in the room was the guaranteed minimum, the money a publisher wants up front before it licenses a single game. A coaching session two weeks earlier had put a figure on doing it worldwide with the whole library: "500k minimum". And one line in my own notes:

I can create a working prototype but not for public launch.

In the chat it came out as "we can't really Show users using our product or have real Reviews :/ since there is no working prototype". What there was instead: 87 signups from a form nobody had pushed, a draft letter to emulator developers that begins "I have never written an emulator or even part of an emulator myself. Still, I want to create a platform that combines tens of emulators", and a petition idea, for publishers to free up access to their old games.

A phone mockup: a status bar at 9:41, a menu icon, Atlantis in blue and a search button. A carousel with A Link to the Past in the middle, then a row Continue Playing with Super Metroid and Super Mario World, and a row Trending with Sonic 2, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II box art
The phone version, first exported on 25 March.
folder
113 files, November 2018 to April 2023, most of them from February and March 2020
made
Adobe XD mockups for TV, web and phone, logo drafts, a landing page draft
decks
five PowerPoint files and two PDFs, the first from 17 February, the last from 18 April 2020
research
press clippings on Stadia, PlayStation Now and xCloud, traffic of ROM sites, a ROM-site lawsuit
code
none

Still rough

It never got further. There is no prototype, the decks show games nobody had licensed, and the question from the coaching notes was never answered: "is it still interesting without Nintendo?". The folder was opened once more in spring 2023, for a to-do list. It sorts the idea into two roads, real consoles streamed from a rack, or emulation starting with "the lamest 3rd party games that no one really wants to play" and ads for a free tier, and it has one line written with some satisfaction, less than three months after Google shut Stadia down:

Google Stadia's failure (which I predicted and the "gaming experts" in the cohort thought I was totally off)

The prediction is in the notes from December 2020: "Stadia has shitty product".

There is nothing to open. The mockups, decks and notes are on my drive, and the game art in them belongs to Nintendo, Sega and the others.