10 Unreleased Video Game Consoles You Never Knew Existed
6. Atari Mirai
The unreleased Atari Mirai console is without doubt the most mysterious entry on this list, as hardly anyone seems to know anything about it.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to the Mirai, the first is that this was going to be an Atari-branded home version of the SNK Neo Geo.
It’s documented that Atari and SNK, who were neighbours in Sunnyvale, California, collaborated for a short time in the late eighties to share some technology. This lead to SNK licensing Ikari Warriors for release on Atari's home systems, but nothing more - well, unless the Mirai was the result. The huge cartridge slot on this prototype only fuels the Neo Geo speculation and the fact “Mirai” is a Japanese Kanji translation of the word “future” stokes the fire a little more.
The second way of thinking is that the Mirai was nothing more than a planned console version of the best selling 16-bit Atari ST computer. It’s well known Atari considered doing such a thing, and the design is incredibly similar to the 1987 Atari XE Games System, itself a 'consolised' version of the 8-bit Atari computer. The huge size of the case would also fit this theory.
The only known prototype was discovered when Atari Corporation closed their doors in 1996, but it’s nothing more than a shell with no hardware inside, not helping to solve the mystery in any way.