Atari Quotes

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did. ~ Nolan Bushnell

The guys from Atari that are making the next Alone in the Dark game came and we had a great meeting. I'd love to do that. I'm a fan of videogames. I like them. And to get to be part of one of them would be a fun and exciting thing. ~ Christian Slater

I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80. ~ Ernest Cline

Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese's were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail. ~ Nolan Bushnell

The 1980s was a time of the great recession of interactive entertainment. When Atari fell in 1982, until Nintendo launched its console, video games were an outcast for five years. ~ Bing Gordon

I was raised on the struggle of elders - iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we'd freed ourselves from slavery and Jim Crow but not the great shackling of minds. The hoppers had no picture of the larger world. We thought all our battles were homegrown and personal, but, like an evil breeze at our back, we felt invisible hands at work, like someone else was still tugging at levers and pulling strings. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We had some really powerful technology - Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Going from having an Atari to a laptop changed everything. It allows me to work anywhere I want and send my work home - I can work anywhere in the world. ~ Cary Fukunaga

I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had. ~ Dallas Roberts

Growing up in Florida, it rained a lot, so we spent a lot of time indoors. I used to love Frogger. I got a lot of use out of that and Ms. Pac-man on my little Atari. ~ Jennifer Sky

And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal. ~ Steve Case

Truth [10w]
Tell the truth and its enemies will scatter like roaches.
Inventory of a Lost Childhood
1. Lion King's Simba missing an eye
2. Conan the Barbarian missing a sword
3. Transformer missing an arm/wing/machine gun
4. Scooby-Doo missing a head
5. Star Wars' R2-D2 missing a gripping tool
6. Etch-a-Sketch missing a knob
7. Powell Peralta skateboard missing a wheel
8. Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle missing a nunchuk
9. Atari console missing a joystick
10. G.I. Joe missing in action ~ Beryl Dov

I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them. ~ Ernest Cline

Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. We had some of the most sophisticated sound-creating systems, and were instrumental in MIDI. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Perhaps because of the special nature of the TIA, or perhaps because of the limitless human capacity for technical fascination, programmers have continued to hack at and develop original VCS games. There is a thriving hobbyist community that has picked up the Atari VCS, using and refining emulators, writing disassemblers and development tools, and even manufacturing cartridges and selling them, complete with boxes and manuals. This "homebrew" scene could be seen, strictly speaking, as continuing the commercial life of the Atari VCS, but the community is not very corporate. It operates on the scale of zines and unsigned bands, with most recent ROMs offered for free online - even if they are also sold in limited releases of a few hundred copies in cartridge form. ~ Nick Montfort

I was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did. 1 Apr 1976 ~ Walter Isaacson

At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something," said Steve Bristow, an engineer. "At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked. ~ Walter Isaacson

I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going. ~ Nolan Bushnell

I was a little hesitant at taking the job at Atari. I had never programmed for a living and I worried it might get boring (building circuits seemed more fun). But I would probably still be in the video game business. ~ David Crane

When I was a kid, I had an Atari 2600, and I would play Pac Man, Frogger, all that kind of stuff. And I did enjoy going to the arcade. ~ Jack McBrayer

So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.' ~ Steve Jobs

When I was running Atari, violence against humanoid figures was not allowed. We'd let you shoot at a tank ... but we drew the line at shooting at people, with blood splattering everywhere. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. "I was on one of my fruitarian diets," he explained. "I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word 'computer.' Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book ~ Steve Jobs

I did a game at Atari Research called 'Excalibur' about the Arthurian legends. At the time, it was very, very complicated, very involved and so forth and actually still looks better than some of the modern games in terms of its richness and involvement. ~ Chris Crawford

I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Selling Atari when I did - I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years. ~ Nolan Bushnell

that there was more life in the old dog, Atari then sold the newly designed 2600 as the Atari 2600 Jr for less than 50 dollars, as well as the 7800 that had been gathering dust in storage for over a year. Videogames were, once again, the big thing, and in ~ Imagine Publishing

I am not a gamer. Not since the days of Atari. ~ Patrick Fischler

Booya!" I shouted in pure triumph, the adrenaline turning my manly baritone into a rather terrified-sounding shriek. "What have you got for fiery beams of death, huh? You got nothing for fiery beam of death! Might as well go back to Atari, bug-boy, 'cause you don't got game enough for me! ~ Jim Butcher

Indisputably we live in a shaped reality, an artificialism. Most people who grasp this are thinking only at a consumer-level, of the "things" they like and need and feel impelled to acquire. But our societal and political arrangements are just as much manipulations of game-pieces and rules as is any Atari or Sega product. The subliminal psychology that drives people to become addicted to games, not to be able to see over the edges of their labyrinths, is transferable to any field whatsoever. ~ Kenny Smith