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.

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.