The troubled "Cyberpunk 2077" has received much criticism for how poorly it plays on standard Xbox One and PS4 consoles. However, whereas these two consoles failed, the much-anticipated Atari VCS seems to have succeeded.

That's right, the crowdfunded Atari revival, which was never intended to compete with consoles or gaming PCs, can run CD Projekt Red's controversial RPG. The key is not to cheat by streaming the game from a cloud service like Google Stadia.

This feat was accomplished by YouTuber Kevin Kenson, who successfully installed and ran Cyberpunk 2077 on an Atari VCS. Unlike playing on the Switch using the cloud, this time it actually runs on the console.

How, as Kenson explains, the Atari VCS is actually a custom PC running a kind of Linux. Obviously, that's not compatible with a typical PC release, so Kenson installed Windows 10 instead--an OS that can play AAA PC games like Cyberpunk 2077. However, it was not that easy, as Atari VCS does not have the hardware to run such a processing-intensive game. [The Atari VCS has only 8 GB of RAM and no dedicated graphics card, so it was not possible to run Cyberpunk 2077 right out of the box. In fact, it was difficult to play small games like "Fortnite" at the lowest settings. To do so, we had to forcibly cancel processes on the machine to free up space and use partitions on the SSD as virtual RAM

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This allowed Cyberpunk 2077 to run on this machine, albeit not very well. In the sample shots seen in the video, the frame rate is slow and the graphics are not particularly pretty. [In fact, Kenson specifically noted that they were noticeably worse than playing the hot-fix version of the game on the Xbox One S. He notes that while the Atari VCS may have performed better than the previous generation consoles on launch day, a number of recent updates have changed that.

In other words, don't buy an Atari VCS just to hack it to play console games; "Cyberpunk 2077" runs poorly, and Kenson said he was unable to get "Doom Eternal" to run at all. Moreover, it takes a lot of work to modify the software to run the game. If a gaming console isn't for you, get the best gaming PC you can afford or sign up for Google Stadia.