The Gameband was supposed to be a watch with a 1.6 inch touchscreen display, the sort of hardware you’d expect to find in a smartwatch, and a focus on gaming — the developers partnered with Atari and planned to load the Gameband with games including Asteroids, breakout, Centipede and Pong.
But a year and a half after raising $500,000 in a Kickstarter campaign for the Gameband, the folks at FMTwo Game are calling it quits.
The watch isn’t going to ship, and it’s unclear if or when backers of the campaign will get refunds.
The team says it’s already spent more money than it raised trying to deal with the technical challenges involved in bringing the Gameband to market. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for those refunds to materialize, unless FMTwo Game gets another source of funding… but with the project effectively cancelled, I’m not sure where that hypothetical funding would come from.
The proposed specs for the watch has included a 320 x 320 pixel display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2,100 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a 400 mAh battery, a microSD card slot, a USB Type-C port, and 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2.
In other words, it would have had the sort of specs you expect from a watch running Google’s Wear OS software, but the idea was to actually ship the Gameband with Android 6.0 Marhmallow and a set of custom apps.
But it seems the company encountered a number of setbacks, eventually leading to key partners including Atari pulling their support of the project.
via Variety
This just does not seem like something worthwhile. Playing games on a 320 x 320 screen sia bout as much fun as “getting hit on the head lessons”; except vastly more expensive.
Do folks like this get banned from KickStarter eventually?
Gameboy was 160×144 IIRC (or close enough), it’s pretty fun.
DS is 256×192, GBA is 240×160.
Now the screen size, control methods, gameplay, that’s a different story when it comes to whether something is “fun”
The guy behind the Gameband campaign was Fergal Mac. He is the guy that strated the AtariBox project which is now the Atari VCS. Fergal is sueing Atari over the Atari VCS as he claims they dumped him from his own project, then renamed it from AtariBox to Atari VCS and then proceeded to run the project themselves without so much as paying him anything
What a twisted web.
It’s ok, he just made half a million dollars on this watch that doesn’t exist.
He’ll be fine.