Robert Smith

It also took out, you know, Mattel gave up on Intellivision.

Yeah.

And the glut goes on for a few years through the mid-80s.

And, you know, retailers themselves don't want to stock video games anymore.

They were left with them.

And in fact, when the next...

video game revival comes, it's driven notably by a game that doesn't call itself a video game, calls itself an entertainment system, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic.

So, you know, maybe anybody would have got wiped out.

Maybe there was nothing Atari could have done.

But I do wonder, you have to wonder, right, what would have happened if Bushnell had managed to hold on to the company, if he'd managed to, say, go public, to not have to sell to Warner, right?

Because clearly Bushnell was the perfect guy to run a video game company, right?

He was the amusement park carny genius who knew what fun was, who knew what games were, who was also an engineer, who also created this culture where engineers could come and play and be creative.

And when he sold, he sold to an entertainment company, right?

It's not about the engineering for them, which is why they sent a shirt guy to run Atari, right?

But it does seem like he thought the engineers were just employees on an assembly line.

And that was a key mistake.

And there's one story that I want to end with that I think really reveals this fact, what a mistake that was.

And that's this.

Not long after Kazar took over, a few of the engineers, the game designers, the guys actually creating these games, realized that they had created games that were making the company millions of dollars.

And they were, you know, staff employees making like $20,000 a year or something.