With all the talk lately surrounding Cyberpunk 2077 and its performance on consoles and PCs, one YouTuber decided to give the game a try on the Atari VCS. He was ultimately surprised when Cyberpunk 2077 successfully ran on the console, albeit with the lowest settings.
Cyberpunk 2077 released on December 10 to mixed reception, with many praising the depth of its world and retro-futuristic soundtrack, while others were shocked at the number of glitches present in the game. Some console gamers even went so far as to request refunds after experiencing Cyberpunk 2077 crashing their consoles. But Kevin Kenson, a YouTuber specializing in gaming content, decided to at least try to get the game running on his newly received Atari VCS, and the results are entertaining.
As Kenson explains in the video, the Atari VCS is essentially a mini-computer. The console is designed to play classic Atari games like Asteroids and Centipede, but it does include a feature that allows a user to boot the console into a dedicated "PC mode" that can run off of a chosen operating system. The console is limited to 8 GB of RAM, though, with no dedicated graphics card, which severely limits its ability to boot up games that require a lot of available memory space. According to Kenson, he was able to run a couple of programs to limit extraneous parts of the Windows operating system and make more than one recently released game run on the console.
Kenson's first win was successfully launching Fortnite on the Atari VCS at minimum settings. After optimizing the performance of Windows 10, he was also able to get the rogue-like Hades, to run at a reduced resolution of 720p. One last trick increasing the page file size of the Windows system finally rendered it possible for Kenson to boot up Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077's gameplay in the video is full of stuttering and poor graphics, but just the fact that the game runs on such an unoptimized machine is pretty cool. Kenson believes that the only reason the game is able to run on the Atari VCS is because of the recent hotfix 1.06 for Cyberpunk 2077 that allows the game to run using a dual-core CPU, which the console happens to have. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to run Doom Eternal, which has a 17.5 GB file size on the Nintendo Switch.
It doesn't that matter that the Atari VCS can't run these more recent games optimally. It's fun just watching content creators play great games using unexpected hardware, like when a streamer beat the Flamelurker boss in the Demon's Souls Remake using a dance pad. For every gamer that runs brand new games at optimal settings on the latest hardware, there will be another using the bare minimum all in the name of fun.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X versions coming in 2021.