While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was little, we used to have Atari.
I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture.
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.
I was a little hesitant at taking the job at Atari. I had never programmed for a living and I worried it might get boring (building circuits seemed more fun). But I would probably still be in the video game business.
When I was a kid, I had an Atari 2600, and I would play Pac Man, Frogger, all that kind of stuff. And I did enjoy going to the arcade.
I have been playing video games since the Atari 2600 days.
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.
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.
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.
Atari is a very sad story.