the Onda

If you are at all interested in how personal computing spent its toddler years, go and check out Gamasutra's history of Atari. It is not particularly well written, and is a bit disjointed, but it is the only complete story that I've seen of Atari, the casual gaming powerhouse that started it all. Among some of the great nuggets I got from the piece:


* even when you've got an insatiable appetite to serve (as was the case with early video games), it takes time to ramp up: Nolan Bushnell and team were both patient and very smart about iterating quickly. And this is despite the fact that they didn't "program" at all (not in the way we understand it), but instead wired transistors and worried about vertical and horizontal blanking to get their games to work. The next time I bitch about the iPhone's relatively weak documentation for development, I am going to remember how these guys had it— and yet, they were still agile.

* content companies suck, but you can route around them: corollary, when you are a young company, avoid lawyers and law suits— you may be legally correct, but the process will bleed you to death. When Atari couldn't license Jaws from Spielberg, they just made a shark game that looked like Jaws... and cleaned up in the market. When everyone started copying their TTL (transitor to transistor logic) arcade games thus violating their intellectual property, they sought to play a market-cornering strategy with suppliers instead of lawyering up. These guys had hair on their chests, balls, and probably hairy balls too!

* big companies are where startups go to die: something I didn't realize was that Atari sold relatively early to Warner, the media company, for much too little money ($28MM). I have always wondered why they seemed to have missed PCs altogether when they had the 8-bit 2600 in the market, and both Steves (from Apple) worked there. Turns out the suits at Warner were more interested in stuffing the channel and reaping rent from the gaming consoles than investing in the exploding personal computer market. When you stop thinking about product and market, and start thinking about the channel and the profit margins, hire the MBAs, call it a commodity business, and get the eff out!

Post a comment