More About The Slightly Mad Studios Mad Box Concept

Last Wednesday, Slightly Mad Studios CEO Ian Bell, surprised us all with a series of Tweets, revealing that SMS is planning to develop a stand-alone gaming console named Mad Box that will support VR and 4K gaming.  In Ian’s own words, the Mad Box will be “the most powerful console ever built”.

Now Ian Bell shared a few rendered concept images showing us how the Mad Box might look when officially announced. At a first glance, the console concept does not resemble any of the small box characteristics of the current generation of consoles on the market. Instead, the rather original design seems to take more features from a modded or gaming PC system case, including some flashy RGB LED implementation.

The Mad Box renders reveal a curved case in the shape of the letter M nicely lined with an RGB-LED lighting strip. The side of the case features a back-lit cut-out Slightly Mad Studios logo.

Furthermore, Mr. Bell stated that the Mad Box “will be a console as is the Xbox or PlayStation” and should become available in “around three years time”. The variety.com website reached out for some more info, and Ian Bell replied:

It will support most major VR headsets and those upcoming and the specs will be equivalent to a ‘very fast PC 2 years from now’, Bell wrote in an email. We’re in early talks with manufacturers of components so we can’t say much more right now other than we have the designs specced out in detail.

The Variety reporter asked Mr. Bell what games will be available on the console and if it would feature exclusive titles.

Mr. Bell replied: We plan to allow games from all developers, old and new. We think exclusives are ‘exclusionary’ but given that we’ll be shipping a cross-platform engine to all developers it will be their choice, Bell wrote. As of now we have no plans to pay developers ‘incentives’ to exclude other hardware vendors.

 

“We think the industry is a little too much of a monopoly or a micro oligopoly,” Bell explained. “We think competition is healthy and we have the required hardware contacts to be able to bring something epic to fruition based on our designs.”

Bell also stated that SMS already received some interesting offers from different potential investors.

We have multiple investors already offering the required funding for us to see the product to completion, but it’s still early days and we’re looking at the best offers right now,” Bell explained. “All that we have approached are discussing standard partial ownership investment deals.

 

As for how much the new console will cost, Bell said it will be competitive with upcoming console prices. Prices will drop with ship quantity but we’re not planning on taking as large a cut as other console owners to enable us to cut prices massively,” he stated. “We fully expect to be matching the best of the rest early in the lifecycle though.

Source:  variety.com