Don’t Hold Your Breath for Atari Hotel Las Vegas

By Scott Roeben, on July 14 2022
2 min read 4 comments
Las Vegas Las Vegas Hotels

Hopes for an announced Atari Hotel in Las Vegas were high at one time, but red flags abound.

Adding to concerns was a story that hasn’t gotten much play in Las Vegas. Atari terminated its relationship with the company set to develop a string of Atari hotels, ICICB Group, in April 2022. The relationship implosion included the termination of “related licenses including hotel and casino licenses,” effective April 18, 2022.

It all has a whiff of some behind-the-scenes drama.

The announced Atari Hotel was a tad on the whimsical side.

Atari, of course, is the iconic videogame company behind Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Centipede, Pong and other games.

According to Atari’s deal with ICICB Group, the videogame company would’ve gotten five percent of the revenue generated by the hotel.

Plans for eight Atari hotels were announced in mid-2020, accompanied by some sweet renderings that caused videogame fans to become engorged with anticipation.

Fear not, nerds, there’s always the Pinball Hall of Fame.

Atari Hotels were also scheduled for Denver, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco and San Jose.

Las Vegas was, presumably, set to be the first Atari Hotel location. Now, optimism has waned significantly.

We got in touch with Atari. Atari says the end of the ICICB deal won’t impact plans for an Atari Hotel in Las Vegas. We’ll be circling back to that assertion every so often.

Shelly Murphy, Managing Partner of Atari Hotels, said via e-mail, “To be clear, ICICB is a separate entity that the former Atari Inc. CEO temporarily granted a hotel license agreement to for hotels only in Dubai, Gibraltar and Spain. Atari, Inc. has since terminated that agreement. We are GSD Group (www.gsdgroup.io), an entirely different entity and directly responsible for the Atari Hotels concept (atarihotels.com). We secured our licensing agreement with Atari Inc. in 2020 and are currently the only group that has a license associated with the hotels. We are very active on the project and currently evaluating multiple opportunities in the Las Vegas market.”

So, while the Atari Hotel in Las Vegas remains a longshot, in our opinion, it appears hope lives.

Few details have been given about the specifics of the Atari Hotel planned for Las Vegas, which is usually a red flag.

Speaking of red flags, the rendering of Atari Las Vegas featured the Transamerica Pyramid.

The Atari Hotels Twitter account went silent in March 2022.

We were a smidge skeptical about the Atari Hotel project from day one. Not many believed this project would come to pass. As time goes by, skepticism is winning.

If the Atari Hotel project implodes, it will be one of many announced projects that fail to materialize.

Some say the distance between a dream and reality is called action. In Vegas, the distance between a dream and reality is money.

Atari might have brand recognition, but don’t hold your breath for an Atari Hotel in Las Vegas.

Update (4/17/23): Define “active on the project.” There’s been no movement on Atari Hotel Las Vegas for some time, and we’re filing this under “Don’t Hold Your Breath.”