Robert Smith

Robert Smith, here is the big question for today's show.

Yes.

How did Atari essentially invent the video game industry in the hearts of millions of young people in the 1970s and then blow up entirely in the early 1980s, basically never to be heard from again?

It's a great question.

We are both of the age where we remember this personally.

I'm a little younger than you, not to throw it in your face.

But so for me, I don't remember Pong, but I remember the Atari 2600 came to be called the 2600, which was like the first video game system like we know it today, where you buy it and there's different cartridges.

And this was, you know, the dominant video game in the early 80s.

I loved it.

I had Defender.

I had Journey, the game Journey, like the band.

Played it for hours.

And so the big question is, what happened?

Like literally wind up having to bury hundreds of thousands of its own products, unsold video game cartridges, in a landfill in New Mexico.

Robert, I guess you would have been going to Lagoon in the 70s.

A few years earlier, it was this college kid named Nolan Bushnell who worked summers there.

On the Midway, like where there was games, like whatever, guess the weight of the guy and knock down the milk cans or whatever.

But he was a carny genius.

He became king of the Midway, was running...

Running all the games when he was like 20 years old because he was really good at getting people to spend their money on the games.