News Atari Responds To Reports Of Faulty Games In $1000 50th XP Collection

​

An Atari representative has responded to reports that two titles in its $1000 50th-anniversary box set are defective.

The posts on Atari Age read as follows:

We have two reported instances of a Haunted House cartridge not working. We cannot confirm why these two carts did not work, it could have been an assembly issue (the XP carts are all hand assembled) or a faulty PCB. Contrary to some speculation, the PCBs were not installed backwards (not really possible on the Limited Edition carts). So this does not seem to be a wide-spread problem. One customer had their cartridge replaced, and we are in contact with the remaining affected customer and will sort this out. That said, it has taken too long for us to resolve that last issue so we deserve some criticism for that.

I do suspect that there might be a larger issue with the Crystal Castles cartridges. The nature of the reports we are getting suggests that a larger number of those carts may indeed have a problem. The code is fine (we double-checked the ROM), but the game is behaving erratically for some users. We haven't been able to isolate the issue to our satisfaction yet, but we have a working theory and we expect a more concrete answer soon. Once we know what we are dealing with we will figure out next steps.
The article and some of the videos that have been posted on this topic have an expected mix of accurate and inaccurate information. Our customer service team has replaced non-working cartridges (not many frankly). Unfortunately that wasn't a useful solution for some people with wonky Crystal Castles cartridges. When we ran out of stock they offered refunds. But we understand that collectors would prefer to hold onto their special editions, especially when it means keeping a complete set together, so a refund isn't a great resolution. We are continuing to work towards a better solution.