Atari is celebrating its 50th anniversary by selling NFTs

Virgin Radio

28 Jan 2022, 11:17

If you have no idea what an NFT is, don’t worry we’ll clear it up.

Video game company Atari is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As some of you may remember, they were very successful in the 70s and 80s with the likes of Pac Man, Crystal Castles and Pong.

In the late 90s, the company sold their name and assets off and are now known as Atari Corporation.

Not to make you feel too old, but Atari is now celebrating their 50th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, they have decided to sell NFTs- even though a lot of people don't know what they are, and the people who do, tend to hate them.

These NFTs will be giftable, with the company calling them GFTs. It will sort of work like a lucky dip where people will blind buy an NFT and will only find out what it is when it’s unwrapped on the date of your choice.

Atari has not said how much they will cost, but they have revealed there will be rare and ‘epic’ versions up for grabs.

However, your chance of getting a rare NFT is less than 5%, and the chances of getting an ‘epic’ one are even lower.

What is an NFT?

Now, you might be wondering, ‘what on earth is an NFT?’

Basically, NFT stands for non-fungible token.

That probably doesn’t clear it up, does it?

It’s kind of like a trading card, so each NFT is a unique thing that you can own. It can be anything digital, but they are mostly drawings, music, videos or graphics.

The culture of NFTs has started to mirror that of fine art collecting (but with digital art) and people pay to own the original version of the thing.

Before you turn your nose up at them, NFTs can be quite profitable. For instance, a 50-second video by a musician named Grimes sold for $390,000.

Despite that, it is unclear why Atari has decided to go down the NFT route, as people don’t really like them or see the point in them anymore.

Fellow video game company Ubisoft, previously announced their plans to create and sell NFTs, but their reveal video got so many dislikes from fans they had to take it down.

It seems there must be enough people still buying NFTs in order for these big companies to deem them worthwhile.