There has been some confusion in the last few days about where the Tempest 4000 port for the Atari VCS is coming from. While the game is complete on PS4 and PC, with Xbox One being the final version needing approval, there was no Linux build available. This is a problem seeing as the Atari VCS runs Linux, plus Llamasoft having had no idea about any version of Tempest 4000 aside from the PS4, Xbox One, and PC/Windows versions. This led to the assumption that the Atari VCS version was running on WINE, which is a compatibility layer (not emulator) for Linux that allows Windows programs to run on it. Atari was showing videos of Tempest 4000 running on a VCS test environment and, seeing as there is no native VCS version, it wasn’t sitting well and leading to claims of “scam!”

The confusion is all officially cleared up as of today by an announcement on the Llamasoft forums. While the more commonly known name in Llamasoft is Jeff Minter, Ivan “Giles” Zorzin is the resident tech wizard who handles the gruntwork of making the games run nice on all platforms. As far as Giles was concerned, Llamasoft’s entire responsibility was two consoles, Windows, then done, and whatever Atari did with Tempest 4000 from there was outside of Llamasoft’s scope of support. After the Tempest 4000/VCS issue blew up on various forums the people at Atari got in touch with Giles and hashed things out, with the outcome being that the game’s existence on another console is guaranteed. How this is happening isn’t clarified, whether it’s the PC version running through WINE as originally assumed or if there’s a VCS-specific version on the way, but it will exist with Llamasoft’s knowlege, blessing, and probably direct involvement.

Official announcement is below, or found in context on the right thread at the Llamasoft forum. If the English is a bit broken, the message would probably be much clearer in Giles’ native Italian.