Atari: Game Over Page #3

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I was in my office

at Warner in 1976.

The phone rang, and it was

a guy named Gordy Crawford,

and he asked the question

I've never forgotten.

Would you guys be interested in

acquiring a technology based,

fast growing

And I said yes.

I didn't know what I said

yes to, but I said yes.

And that led to my

introduction to Atari.

Atari, where

the future comes from.

What excited

me about Atari wasn't Pong,

it was the chipset that

led to the Atari 2600.

Pong was sort of OK, you banged

up and back, and up and back.

But this meant you could

constantly change the games.

And that was a

very exciting idea.

We introduced the 2600

in 1977

with nine cartridges.

The home video game was a

very close approximation

of the coin-op experience.

It changed

the mindset of the world.

Turning the television

from a passive medium into

an active medium, that

was what we knew we were doing.

And that was super exciting to

be the pioneers in that field.

It just blew people away.

Nobody knew any this stuff.

They made it up as they went.

And they were good at it.

And it started everything.

It was playing

those games that taught people

the potential of a computer.

Atari,

at some level,

brought the computer revolution.

They

started experimentally

hiring smart kids, with this

idea that maybe they can

come up with other stuff to do.

And they inadvertently

were trying to create

the job of game designer.

Microprocessor real

time control programming

is just where it's at.

So, there's two kinds of

things you typically do

with that in the early 1980s.

You can do missile

guidance systems...

or like we say, kill

people for 12 cents a head.

Or you could make

video games, which

I thought was a much

better application

for the whole thing.

What went on at

Atari from the very beginning

was, basically, that

the engineers are

going to drive this company.

Because they weren't

just engineers.

They were creative guys.

They're like musicians,

or movie directors.

They're artists.

Through

luck, or providence, or both,

they ended up with this

department of game designers

that became this

dream team at Atari.

These guys who made all of

these classics... Tempest,

and Asteroids, and Centipede,

and Gauntlet, and, you know,

think of a game.

The

culture was these guys

do what they want to do.

One day, I was standing in

the men's room, at a urinal,

and I looked down, and I saw a

pair of bare feet next to me.

And I look, and here is a

guy wearing a pair of shorts,

and nothing else.

And I said something.

And they said, oh

yeah, that's so and so.

He's a great engineer.

He doesn't like to wear clothes.

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