In March 2021, Atari announced the launch of a crypto casino with a virtual presence. The launch was supposed to take place in Vegas City Decentraland, but so far the game functions on the Unity engine.
Until recently, the casinoatari.com website was unavailable. When visiting the site, you were asked to enter the administrator login and password. And just a couple of days ago, this form disappeared and it became possible to register at the Atari Casino. Remarkably, there were no announcements of this event on Twitter of Atari or Atari Token. I hastened to test this unusual casino and am sharing my experience with you.
Atari Casino Test
Creating an Account at Atari Casino
After the download of the game is completed, you need to select a wallet with which in-game transactions will be made. You can choose between Metamask, WalletConnect, and Torus.
I chose Metamask and was asked to change the network to Rinkeby. I assume the same will apply to other wallets.
After you have chosen a wallet, you can create an account. To do this, enter your email address, create a password and select a gender. There are only 2 genders to choose from, which is quite behind by modern standards.
Setting up the game
After registration, we get to the main menu. Here you can customize characters, customize controls and graphics, and visit the marketplace.
Let’s go through each item. In the customization section, you can change the appearance and gender of your avatar. The choice of hairstyles and clothes is still small and, to be honest, things are not working very well so far. In the screenshots below, you see a character in pants and shorts. Try to find 10 differences.
Next comes the “Controls” menu item, in theory, here you can see how to control the character and, if desired, change it. But we can’t say for sure, since this button simply does not work. Then the item “Settings”. At the moment, only changes to the graphics parameters are available. By the way, there is no music or other sounds in the casino at all.
And the last menu item “Marketplace” is also not available at the moment. I suppose it will be possible to buy clothes for the character and other in-game items there.
Making a Deposit
At the moment, the casino only supports ATRI. The desired number of tokens must be in your wallet, as well as Ethereum, in order to pay the fees. Really big fees.
Unfortunately, I do not have Atari Tokens and I am not ready to pay $ 100 on top for a transaction, so today I will not test the casino by playing for real money. And to be honest, I’m not sure it’s safe to do this yet.
Exploring Atari Casino from the inside
After all the settings are completed, press the “Start” button. We find ourselves in a virtual city. The game controls are intuitive if you’ve played at least one video game. The character moves by pressing the arrows or WASD, jumps to the space bar, and accelerates to the left shift. In order for the cursor to appear, you need to press the Esc button, and you can return control of the character with the right mouse click. Wasting no time, I went straight to the casino building.
The interior is reminiscent of a land-based casino hall but more scarce, there is too much empty space. Other players should fill it, but I was there alone. There are several games inside, namely slots, roulette and blackjack, which is currently not working.
In addition to games, there is a stand in the hall where you can buy NTF. If I understand correctly, this is a unique outfit for your character. Currently unavailable.
And what caught my personal attention were slot machines with original Atari games, for example, Asteroids. Unfortunately, they do not work at the moment.
After wandering around the casino, I went to see what else is in this city. In addition to the casino building from which we left, I managed to find 2 buildings where apartments are sold in the form of NTF for Atari coins.
And NTF Mall, which is now empty.
Summing up
Well, the Atari casino is clearly not ready yet. The product looks like a beta version at best. Therefore, for now, I do not recommend playing there for real money. Here and there, unfinished pieces of the game pop up, and from time to time the game just freezes. But the concept looks interesting. I will continue to follow the development of Atari Casino and will update my blog. Stay tuned.
After posting this article on Twitter I got a reply from Atari. And I was partly right, this is some kind of unfinished beta version of Atari Casino.
The official launch is still ahead, but for now, you can check out the trailer. Everything will look much better than what is shown in the article.