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Bruce Horn: We really did think that this was going to liberate people from the tyranny of Big Computing.

Randy Wigginton: Like, “Here we are. We are freedom fighters, the Empire is about to win, the Death Star has moved into position, and we are the only ones there that can save the planet.”

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Burrell Smith: Back then it was the joy of being absorbed, being intoxicated by being able to solve this problem. You would be able to take the entire world with its horrible problems and boil it down to a bunch of microchips.

Michael Naimark: But after Alan left things started tanking very quickly. Atari went from like earning billions to losing billions. And I think the first quarter of ’84 was the turning point.

David Crane: It was a whole disaster. There was a time when Atari lost a hundred million dollars in a qu…

Howard Warshaw: They bought E.T. as a loss leader to keep it away from other people. Back then Atari was the vast majority of the industry, but there was also Mattel, there was Coleco.

David Crane: They had to get it out by a certain time frame for Christmas.

Nolan Bushnell: Therefore the dea…

Alan Kay: Atari was greedy and they were making a shitload of money off really obsolete games toward the end there.

Al Alcorn: You know in Silicon Valley if you don’t obsolete yourself somebody else will, right? The Warner guys didn’t really understand that. They were from an East Coast company …