Ed Helms
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
His arcade game, Pong, was a monster hit, so he set up Atari...
to build a home games console, which became the must-have Christmas present of 1975.
Atari was the name on every kid's lips, but then the investors came, and the investors brought pressure.
Bushnell and his engineers were pushed aside as Atari expanded, and in a desperate bid to cash in on Hollywood hype,
The company concocted a wild plan for a game based on Steven Spielberg's mega-hit E.T.
the Extraterrestrial.
Developed in mere weeks, it tanked and brought Atari down with it.
Which is ironic because I remember the game E.T.
on Atari when I was a little kid and I loved it.
Anyway...
Here's the episode.
If you enjoy it, there's more tales of founders, business success, and spectacular failures on business history.
Available on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Snafu, your favorite podcast about history's greatest screw-ups, or more precisely a show about what our failures and foibles say about humanity as a whole.
And spoiler alert, it's mostly not very good.
I'm your host, Ed Helms, and my guest today is the definition of a multi-hyphenate.
He is the bassist and a founding member of one of my all-time favorite bands, the Avett Brothers.
He also is an historian.
He hosts American History Hotline for iHeart Podcasts and The Road to Now on Sirius XM.