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I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture.

When I was little, we used to have Atari.

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.

Selling Atari when I did - I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years.

While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.

Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work.

Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese's were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.

The 1980s was a time of the great recession of interactive entertainment. When Atari fell in 1982, until Nintendo launched its console, video games were an outcast for five years.

I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.

Atari collapsed in '84, and I went freelance, and that was when I started spreading out and doing my own thing. I really cut loose and did a game called 'Trust and Betrayal', which was the first game solely about interpersonal relationships.