Robert Smith

This East Coast businessman who doesn't know anything about video games or engineering turns the Atari 2600 into a smash hit.

Turns out he's a really good marketer, has a sense of what's going on, and he has the good sense to license a hit arcade game that was not made by Atari, a game called Space Invaders.

I'm sure you remember well.

Of course.

Beautiful game.

He licenses it for Atari to develop for the 2600.

Remember, they're in the console business, right?

Console business is not doing great.

The console business needs its killer app.

Space Invaders becomes the killer app.

And the popularity of this piece of software drives the sales of the hardware, right?

Everybody goes out and buys a 2600 so they can play Space Invaders.

So revenue at Atari, before Kazar got there, it was less than $100 million.

And after he'd been running Atari for a few years, revenues are over a billion, right?

He has 10x more.

And now it's the early 80s and America is going bananas for video games.

I don't know the name.

Pac-Man fever.

It was an actual hit song.

It was an actual hit song.