by
Adam Fisher
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Alvy Ray Smith: I would come home at like four in the morning typically, because I’d stay until I dropped. I’d come home and crash and be up as soon as I could and go back in and keep going and keep going and keep going. It was so much fun. It was just a thrill a minute. Every day I was just flipping out. It was hard to go to sleep because it was so much fun tearing the world apart. Every day everything you touched had never been seen before or never been thought of before or codified before. Just everything that happened was new. We used to sit around and talk about how this was what it felt like to be with Balboa in Panama or something. You know: the first guys ashore, the first Europeans ashore. And you get to name everything. It was the early days, right?
conquest is, indeed, great for the conquerers
Randy Wigginton: Steve was never very technical, even though he liked to say he was, but he really never was. I don’t know that he could actually program or design hardware. I never saw any evidence of it. He was more interested in the Homebrew Computer Club as a way to make a business. I mean he just wanted to work for himself, he always wanted to be in control of his own destiny. He really wanted to be rich when he was young.
Steve Wozniak: Steve wasn’t into social good. He was into “Do we have something that can make money?” He was always looking at that. He’d been selling my stuff for five years. He’d come into town about once every couple years and see what I’d created lately and he’d turn it into money. He was really money oriented at the start.
think about this more. on the one hand, people insist that his macro motives were financial. otoh, his day-to-day decisions (esp product ones) weren't necessarily strictly financial. maybe in the big picture yeah, but he was motivated by other pressing needs too (re: design)
money as what? crutch to fall back on? social validation?
Bob Whitehead: The four of us began to look up the numbers and we found out just the four of us were responsible for in excess of $200 million in sales, just our games. That was after a year and a half or so of sales.
David Crane: Since we went out to lunch together and tended to look at these things together, we totaled up the sales of all the games that we did. And that was interesting, because about 60 percent of the total sales from the previous year were games that the four of us did. Twenty percent of the revenues from the previous year were people who had left Atari, just to go off and do other things. And of the thirty people left, they accounted for about 20 percent of the revenue.
Al Miller: And so I researched the music and the book publishing industries to develop a contract that I thought would be fair for my situation at Atari. And I submitted it to my management, saying this is the kind of relationship I want. I want recognition for my work and I proposed something like a 2 or 3 percent commission royalty, which was pretty low relative to the music and the book publishing industry. And I started having discussions with my management and then it bopped up to senior management, Ray.
David Crane: We went into Ray Kassar’s office and we told them all about it.
Al Alcorn: They said, “Well, come on, give us a piece.” They didn’t want a lot, just five cents a cartridge.
[...]
Al Alcorn: Ray’s attitude was that the engineers were a bunch of high-strung prima donnas.
David Crane: And he said, “Well, you know this is a corporate product. It’s an engineering product. There are hundreds of employees at Atari. And if that guy over there didn’t do his job we wouldn’t have sold $60 million. If that guy over there didn’t do his job we wouldn’t have sold $60 million. In fact if the guy on the assembly line hadn’t put them together we wouldn’t have made $60 million on the games. So you are actually no more important than the guy on the assembly line who puts them together.” That was the end of that meeting. And in fact we were walked out by a senior vice president who just kind of chuckled at the way that meeting went and said, “Well, guys, it’s been nice knowing you.” Because he knew that we’d be gone soon.
honestly i side with crane here. ofc, that's not to defend the status quo of ridiculously high exec salaries. the immediate alternative is: more equal pay across the board, and only dealing with suppliers who have good labour/environmental practices and maybe even a cheaper product if salaries are too high
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 and thought that they had an evergreen kind of product. They thought that they would just sit back and mint money for the rest of their lives selling the Atari VCS for the next twenty years.
that's a good saying actually
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 deal constrained the engineering time to six weeks.
Howard Warshaw: Five weeks and one day. But I didn’t get to start until dinnertime the first day.
Al Alcorn: Ray was like, “What?” Ray had learned enough by this time to know that this was kind of crazy, but the deal was done and he had to do it.
Howard Warshaw: Nobody had ever done a game in less than six months on the VCS, and I had to do a game in five weeks. I was used to working under pressure, but this was just crazy. The CEO of Atari was betting a lot of his career on making this thing happen.
another demand for tech worker organising: an end to unreasonable deadlines due to poor sales-related decision-making
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 quarter.
Alan Kay: It went awfully fast. In their first bad year I think they lost a billion.
Howard Warshaw: By mid-1984 we were down to two hundred people. So, in about a year and a half the company goes from ten thousand employees to two hundred employees, and I was still one of those people. It was a dark time.
Kristina Woolsey: We thought the video game business was over.
Brenda Laurel: At the very end, I’m told, it was like the fall of Saigon. People were dropping equipment into the trunks of their cars from the second story. You know it was just like chaos. Everybody moving out and people carting computers down the stairs.
yikes
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.
that's the dream huh
(when in reality you're just ignoring most of the problem to solve a much, much simpler one)
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.”
Steve Wozniak: The Macintosh was going to lead to big problems later on, but he convinced us all. I believed it was the future. John Sculley believed it. Steve convinced us all, and we believed it.
Randy Wigginton: We actually believed it!
Yukari Kane: Looking back, there’s definitely an irony there. Apple is now an empire—the most valuable company in the world—and once you become an empire, you are the establishment.
yeeeeep
Alan Kay: Computing is terrible. People think—falsely—that there’s been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don’t realize that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimization. They have to do with fitness. If you have a stupid environment you are going to get a stupid fit.
great quote
Michael Stern: The kids, they just worked nonstop. They’d work in bouts.
Megan Smith: That’s what the kids in Silicon Valley do in their twenties. We work like crazy and have an amazing time. Maybe some other folks are busy partying or doing whatever they’re doing, but the Silicon Valley kids are inventing together and that’s the community.
omg this is such perfect "i studied the blade" reasoning