Robert Smith

Delightfully, I don't know, 10 years ago or so, they made a documentary where they actually went and dug up the landfill in Alamogordo.

And in fact, they found E.T.

cartridges there and other video games.

This is...

really the end for atari and it's a perfect obviously metaphorically right like there it's a burial they are burying video games and and you know atari is going to have this sort of shambolic afterlife as brands do as companies do they get acquired and acquired and whatever so let's go back to the question we asked at the beginning and try and answer it right like atari is

practically speaking, invented video games.

They changed culture.

They changed business.

They brought the computer to the home.

Video games continued to be this giant thing.

Atari disappeared.

Why?

Like, why did that happen?

And I think there are a few answers that it's worth going through, right?

One is just timing.

One is just kind of bad luck, right?

Like, the crash of 83, the video game crash of 83, was...

Brutal.

And it took out everybody, right?

It took out Atari, but it also took out Coleco, which was making ColecoVision.