[...] this new nerd culture is the best possible news for our collective future, given the awesome challenges ahead. Soon there will be nine billion people crowding this warming planet, and each one will come equipped with a supercomputer in their pocket. So I’m optimistic, bullish even. Who better to inherit the Earth, at a time of crisis, than a generation obsessed with science and engineering?

Larry Brilliant: Steve used to write me when he started Apple. I would get these letters, and then one day he just called me. He said, “Do you remember when we would say ‘power to the people’? That’s what I’m doing, I’m giving power to the people. I’m building a computer that every person can put on their desktop, and I’m going to get rid of the high price of the mainframes.”

Sean Parker: And then it becomes the post–social media era. It’s all the people who would have become investment bankers who want to go start internet companies, and it’s a purely commercial, purely transactional world. It’s just become this transactional thing, and it’s attracted the wrong type of people. It’s become a very toxic environment. A lot of people have shown up believing, maybe correctly, that they can cash in. But that’s Silicon Valley the ATM machine, not Silicon Valley the font of creativity and realization of your dreams.

Chris Caen: This is a little clichéd and eye-rolling—and it’s not true for all the entrepreneurs—but I think for a large portion of the entrepreneurs here they generally kind of make the world better. Look at all these entrepreneurs who are living five to an apartment, who are not making a lot of money, and may never make a lot of money. They can get a six- or seven-figure job at a bank or a large company but they choose to do this. At the end of the day it’s not money, it’s this emotional connection: “I am somehow connected with this world in a different way, and I can act upon that.” I think that is unique to Silicon Valley. Even back to the original days of Atari, there was this idea that you can have an emotional-professional career, and that’s okay. You can say, “I want to do this because I want to do this,” and that’s accepted.

Ralph Baer: They made a couple hundred Pong games during 1972 toward the end of the year. And it was thirteen thousand Pong games the next year. The competition made more than that, everybody was making knockoffs.

Al Alcorn: Bally copied it, but it was with permission because we had a relationship with them. Nutting just stole Pong and made a game called Computer Space Ball, because everything they had was Computer this—Computer Quiz, Computer Space, Computer Space Ball… Clever! Why didn’t they ask us? Everybody else stole it except Ramtek. When I say “stole it,” I mean just copied the circuitry that I designed. Ramtek actually looked at it and made their own electronic version. They made a copy, but they didn’t take the schematic.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.