AS ODD AS IT MAY SOUND LOOKING BACK, ATARI’S COIN-OP Division, led by Lyle Rains, began to feel like a bit of an outcast from the very company it helped create. The Coin-Op developers were the ones who would come up with unique ideas, figure out how to get them implemented, tune the gameplay until it was just right, and get fans to fall in love with the game, but Kassar would give all the credit to the Consumer Division when the bare-bones ports (which were often inferior, due to hardware limitations) succeeded on the Atari Video Computer System, or VCS. It was extremely frustrating for them at the time, and left them feeling like second-class citizens when they were actually responsible for the majority of the creative work that went into each project.
Because of this, they felt like they had the right to push back a little bit. If Kassar wasn’t going to give them the attention they deserved, they were going to take it … one way or another. Unfortunately for Kassar, the ways in which they decided to go about this weren’t always the epitome of productivity.
Just as the early days of Atari had felt a lot like the Wild West, these new days in the Coin-Op Division gave off a similar vibe. When you were first hired as a programmer at Atari, you were given an office, a development console, and a big pile of development tutorials written by other programmers at the company and were told to make an idea happen in the next six months. That was it. No one really came to check on you once you started on a project, and they certainly didn’t regularly give advice as to where you should start. You just did your own thing and, if all went well, delivered a finished product in six months.
It wasn’t meant to be unorganized or disheveled in this regard, but rather to emphasize the sense of freedom and self-ownership in your product that working in the Coin-Op Division provided. This method was more of a motivator than anything else, but it often caught new programmers off guard, as they felt they had to perform, big time, to see their first game through to completion. The Coin-Op Division wanted you to feel like this project was all yours and that its success and failures were ultimately your responsibility.
That’s easier said than done, of course, but with Gene Lipkin at the helm, it felt like Coin-Op really believed it. Whatever you wanted to do, as long as it was sound and you believed it would succeed, you were encouraged to do. It was your project, and it was up to you to make it happen. Sure, you weren’t always the singular programmer as the projects began to grow in size, but many still found themselves to be the sole arbiter of their destiny within the industry, and that excited them.
They’d immediately get to work on an existing idea they had, flipping through the book of preapproved ideas, or lighting up a joint to do some thinking. They’d come a long way since the heroin-plagued bathrooms of Pong’s production plant, but that didn’t mean they were cutting back on the marijuana use—not in the slightest. It was something that Bushnell had always insisted was vital to both the creative process and the culture of Atari at the time—and the Coin-Op developers weren’t going to let his legacy go to waste.
Once they had the idea figured out, that’s when the hard work began. In these days, you had the tutorials that you were given, but there was still a lot of uncharted territory when it came to programming for a game. When Bushnell departed in 1978, Adventure hadn’t even been released and many of the company’s most impactful advances were still to come, demonstrating just how much there was left to learn. When you didn’t know how to do something, you just had to keep trying until it worked, no matter how close to madness it drove you.
With tight deadlines and a high pressure to perform, programmers often found working at Atari to be all-consuming. It wasn’t a job where you were able to clock in a solid eight hours from nine to five and then enjoy a nice weekend with your family. If you were working on a project at Atari, that project became your life. Long hours and endless trial and error made for an environment that thrived on camaraderie: you were all in it together, all encountering the same issues and working the same long hours trying to create the same excitement for a player, even if you were all working on different projects.
It may sound like a terrible environment, but that couldn’t be farther from how those working there actually felt. Sure, it had its negatives, but they were creating the future of entertainment and were having fun doing it; they wouldn’t have traded that for anything in the world. This was, after all, Atari; what could be better?
At the height of development on a project, it wasn’t uncommon to find people staying at the office for days at a time, only stopping work to get a few hours of sleep curled up under their desks in the early morning. They’d wake up, roll up a joint on the way to lunch, and get back at it. That was the culture at the time. It’s unlike anything seen today in working America, but it worked for Atari—and would soon become the basis for Silicon Valley culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Though the revelry was much more modest than in the company’s beginnings, it was the continuation of the party-filled nights and days that Bushnell had implemented years earlier even as the company transitioned to a more corporate setting with its acquisition by Warner Communications.
The more Atari grew, the more traditional entertainment and manufacturing executives were brought in, changing the company’s culture one piece at a time. But for now, the Coin-Op programmers were happy to keep doing as they had always done. It was an environment you couldn’t find anywhere else, and this had always been one of Bushnell’s greatest hopes: to create something so unique that people were willing to sacrifice to be a part of it. It was a testament to how badly these programmers wanted to be a part of the culture. The company was at the forefront of the future and of innovation, at least under Bushnell’s direction, and that meant something to people, especially during such a revolutionary period.
Deadlines were fair: you often had multiple months to complete a project, but often the culture itself became a blocker to productivity. The relaxed nature of their working environment often led to days where programmers would spend more time getting high and pulling pranks around the office than actually working. No one really cared that they were doing this, but for as much as they enjoyed having fun, they took their work even more seriously. You could have all the fun you wanted, but your game was going to be done when you said it was—otherwise there would be consequences. With such easy distractions as prevalent as they were, all-nighters quickly became commonplace so that programmers could meet deadlines and actually ship games.
Yet despite the sleepless nights and cold comfort of an early morning nap on the office floor, no one complained. They loved what they were doing. These people weren’t asked to trade their lives for their work; they lined up to do so, something that Bushnell always referred to as “a sign that they were doing something right.” Continuing long after his departure from the company, this process would become symptomatic of what Atari would continue to represent throughout the golden age of arcade gaming. Atari was the spot to work at if you wanted to make games that people would play, and the company eventually controlled more than seventy-five percent of the gaming market. If you wanted to make games, the sacrifice was worth it.
This wasn’t one programmer’s bad work habits becoming revisionist history, either. It was, in fact, pervasive throughout the culture that emphasized Bushnell’s “work hard, play hard” mentality. Sure, you might spend some sleepless nights at the office, but you were creating the future—so you had a few beers, slept it off, and kept on working.
It was a fun, outrageous, completely unprofessional workplace that resulted in some of the most revolutionary and popular video games the world has ever seen. Behind those massive successes were programmers, and at Atari, those programmers ruled the world; this mentality often carried over into other aspects of office life. If they wanted to get a game of foam football going across their cubicles, they would. They had free run of the place and did as they pleased; no one was going to tell them to stop. It didn’t matter if Steven Spielberg himself was walking through the office, they would continue doing whatever they wanted to do.
This was, quite obviously, a massive frustration for Kassar, who was attempting to repair Atari’s reputation and gain support from other aspects of the entertainment industry, all of whom were much more buttoned up than even the Coin-Op Division’s best. Even with Atari’s notoriety and penchant for success, there still needed to be businesspeople who could ensure everything else was running smoothly, so that once the games were finally done, they could get them out the door.
Both Kassar and his upper-management staff would take industry executives on tour of the campus, and visitors always wanted to see the famous Coin-Op Division. When they did, they were greeted with programmers goofing off and causing a ruckus while upper management tried to show these outside executives what they were working on. In reality, it looked like the answer was somewhere along the lines of “not a whole lot,” but the Coin-Op developers kept putting out games, and much faster than anyone else in the market.
From the outside looking in, most assumed that a company as dominant as Atari had to be run like a tight ship from top to bottom, but in reality that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. It’s true, some areas were more focused on moving the business toward a professional attitude than others, but that didn’t stop the holdovers from Bushnell’s days from carrying on the legacy that he had built in the company. He had created something that didn’t run like a traditional business and encouraged individual contribution, while still retaining the benefits that a professional organization could provide. This brought the backbone Atari would need as a company to succeed overall, with strong focus on extremely professional production and manufacturing, but it let the Coin-Op Division run on its own, pushing through without the structure its developers had so purposefully avoided for so long. As much disdain as Kassar had for the way the unit functioned, he knew better than to meddle too hard with success. After all, Coin-Op was forming the basis for the successful VCS home console projects, even if he didn’t want to admit it at the time.
Because of this, Coin-Op was able to get away with pretty much anything. It was an office filled with pranks, constant interruptions of people yelling about one thing or another, and, of course, “smoke breaks.” At the end of the day, though, work still came first. It just meant that the end of the day wasn’t the same time as it was for software engineers down the road. It was much, much later.
Each developer had his or her individual deadlines, and met them no matter what the cost—and there was a cost, but that cost just didn’t seem to matter as much to those at Atari. They enjoyed being there. For so many of them, they felt at home. They were able to show off their crazy personalities and be the truest version of themselves without having to worry about management thinking they were just a little too over the top. Because they didn’t have to worry about any of this, they were able to express themselves in a much more natural way, unafraid of conflicting with corporate culture or those around them who disagreed. They were able to focus solely on their mission to create, free from the judgment of those around them. This mission was empowering: they felt as if they could try anything in the world and didn’t have to worry about whether it made sense or not. As long as the game ended up in the best state for the player, people really weren’t concerned how it got there. This created a sense of family in which many felt they had found where they finally belonged, and this had been Bushnell’s exact vision from the start.
Since the very beginning, this had always been a major priority for Bushnell: if they were going to spend almost all their time together, they might as well become friends in the process. One way that he attempted to reward employees and kick this off was the weekly party. Every Friday afternoon, without fail, Bushnell would throw a huge party that brought everyone together to celebrate the completion of another week. They were working really long hours, and he knew how challenging that could be on people, so he wanted to make sure they knew how much he appreciated them. They’d grab a lot of beer and take a break from whatever they were working on. It was a time to grow relationships and really get to know the people you saw twenty hours a day.
There was another motivator for this too, though: deloading. Bushnell knew the work was difficult, but he didn’t want people to become overwhelmed by it. If you didn’t find some time to unwind, it was really easy to break down, which would set the project back as you recovered. He wanted to implement some forced downtime as a part of his “work hard, play hard” motto. If you gave people time to play, they were essentially required to take a break, allowing them to clear their heads and go back to it in a few hours with a fresh mind-set, ready to keep working. Deloading is a form of preparation employed by weight lifters in which they force themselves to take downtime—not to regress, but to prepare themselves for even harder work yet to come for which they would need to be able to operate at a higher level than ever before.
Bushnell wanted you to be able to have a drink and converse with your coworkers, but the real purpose behind it all was to give you these moments of relaxation to increase the amount of work you were then able to complete. As a result, people were willing to work harder and longer at Atari than almost anywhere else, because they knew there was always something crazy, silly, and fun right around the corner.
Yet despite all this fun, the work was very serious. They had cultivated an environment based on fun and family, but if you couldn’t do your job, you couldn’t work at Atari. It was one of the hottest companies in the world; there were hundreds of programmers lined up who would kill to take the job of someone who couldn’t perform—and Atari knew it. As far as the company was concerned, there wasn’t any room for dead weight, and the leadership at Atari became very skilled at cutting out those who couldn’t keep up or find a way to mesh with the culture—despite there being an internal culture clash that would later shake up the core foundation of what Atari had come to be known for.
Everyone wanted to be a part of Atari. You could have fun in a way that no other office did, work with extremely talented, like-minded people, and get paid well to do it. It was the dream, and there was nowhere else that people wanted to be—if you worked at Atari, you did everything you could to stay there.
This is even truer in the context of the time. The United States had just been through multiple recessions and the Cold War was beginning to escalate, with nuclear weapons reaching their peak within the USSR. It was a scary time for the average American. You didn’t know if you were safe from nuclear war, let alone whether you would have a job by the end of the year. It wasn’t a time for extravagant vacations or purchases. It wasn’t a fun time, to say the least, but Atari provided a somewhat safe haven.
Atari provided financial stability, for sure, but there was an emotional stability that came with that. Employees worked in a place built around happiness and creativity, something that many valued more than money at the time—and this was evident in the way they worked. Programmers weren’t paid overtime, but that didn’t stop them from filling the building (and parking lot) on Saturdays and Sundays. This eventually became an issue, as Atari had to begin paying others to come in on the weekends to keep up with the volume of work the programmers were putting out. After all, it didn’t really matter how quickly programmers could work if the engineers weren’t there to get the game ready to ship.
As this culture of long hours and full devotion to one’s work continued to grow, five twelve-to-sixteen-hour days began to expand spread to seven. Despite Kassar’s desire for the opposite, this wasn’t a culture based around office hours and strict rules; it was about doing everything you needed to create the best product for the consumer, no matter the cost. The full parking lot on the weekends was less an indicator of how many people came in during the day on the weekends and more about how few people were there during normal business hours in the traditional workweek. As working hours stretched longer and longer, many found themselves forgoing sleep in favor of continuing to work, pushing themselves through multiple days of continuous labor without sleep. This often resulted in a cavalcade of different working shifts, with some programmers working for four days straight, then taking a full forty-eight hours to recover before coming back in and doing it all over again.
This full house on the weekends quickly became common, and it speaks volumes of the impact that Atari had on these programmers’ lives. It wasn’t just about creating great games: it was about giving them somewhere to go where they felt safe. Some people didn’t need this and saw it only as a job. For others, it was their shelter from the outside world. After all, if you dedicate yourself entirely to your work, you don’t exactly have time to watch the evening news.
When they weren’t sleeping, they were in the office working. Any semblance of a work-life balance dissolved for most programmers working at Atari at the time—but that was exactly how both they and Atari wanted it. They were able to escape the terrors of reality, and Atari was able to get more from them than anyone else; it was one of the most productive times in game development history.
These games were, obviously, much smaller in scale than the games we see today, and they often featured only a single programmer, but the concept was simple: give someone the keys to the kingdom, let him run with his idea in a culture based around creativity and hard work, and watch the results flourish. This was an extremely fruitful endeavor for both parties, but proved to be unsustainable in the long term. Many programmers found themselves unable to handle the pressures that came with maintaining such a lifestyle. There were multiple reports of breakdowns from exhaustion during those days, and it’s not hard to imagine why. Just as Dave Theurer would soon experience with Missile Command, devoting yourself fully to something at this extreme a level often led to intense cases where you could become overwhelmed by your work and find yourself unable to move forward.
But if you were able to get through this, you were rewarded with one of the most creative environments to ever exist, working with some of the smartest creators to grace the gaming industry. Given the opportunity to work with such intelligent people, many often found those first few years at Atari to be some of the most significant in their career from an educational standpoint. Not only were you given the freedom to experiment and test out new things, regardless of whether they made it into the final game, but you were able to work through challenging ideas with those much smarter than you. It bred a culture that relied on creativity and hard work to get the best possible product out of you.
This was key to Atari’s success, resulting in some of the most innovative and well-received games to ever be created. The company was able to take people who had never created a game before, give them the tools and peers needed to succeed, and transform them into rock stars capable of creating masterpieces in a matter of months. It was truly extraordinary and unlike anything seen since. Unfortunately, it was also key to Atari’s demise.
As The Coin-Op Division’s best and brightest continued to grow, they began to realize how vital they were to the success of the company despite their relatively low pay and recognition compared to those in the Consumer Division. It was a difficult place for the company to be in; it had just lost a lot of the major players from the Bushnell days upon his departure, which freed up room for new people to come in, but that also left a lot of ambiguity in how the company was sharing its success with the employees directly responsible for it.
Atari realized it was in a tough place and needed to do something about it. It was earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year, while programmers were often earning around twenty-five thousand dollars, regardless of how successful any game was. There wasn’t a bonus program that rewarded them based on the sales of their games, and there certainly weren’t major career advancement opportunities coming out of Coin-Op. If Kassar needed new workers, he brought them in from the outside. This limited the options that people felt they had available, which only made things worse.
If your game was a massive success, you were definitely afforded perks that others weren’t, giving you the opportunity to choose preferential ideas and projects, but this didn’t feel too different from the free-flowing nature of individuality and ownership that already existed within Atari. You still had to make a game that didn’t have a direct affect on your compensation, so some felt that Atari was taking advantage of the culture it had created to avoid rewarding those who brought the most value.
This affected not only Coin-Op but also the Consumer Division. Around this time, the VCS was beginning to boom, and sales were exceeding Atari’s wildest expectations. The entire company was ecstatic, and Kassar had his team push programmers in both Coin-Op and Consumer to pump out even more titles to continue the company’s meteoric rise. Unfortunately, one of the ways Atari did this actually ended up working against it in a pretty major way. To help spark creativity and increase ownership over its projects, Atari’s marketing lead sent out an internal memo that detailed sales for the year, game by game, listing each as a percentage of sales. In the mind of the marketing lead, this was an easy way for people to see the most popular titles and use this as inspiration for what might land best with consumers. But doing so inadvertently allowed programmers to see how much (or how little) their one-person game had earned, pushing some to recognize their direct contribution to Atari was worth more than a hundred times their current salary. For many of these programmers, it was a wakeup call as to just how out of control things were beginning to spiral.
This came to a head in the fall of 1979 when one of the original Atari VCS programmers, Alan Miller, set a meeting with Kassar to discuss a fix for this growing issue. He felt that the programmers weren’t being treated fairly for the value they were bringing to the company. He didn’t see the work that he did as a simple business transaction, but rather as art, and he wanted it to be treated as such. In more traditional artist contracts, they were given insight to—and rewarded for—sales numbers, which directly affected their pay. He understood that this was different from what they had done up to that point, but felt that, with small teams where they were each directly responsible for such a large part of the game, they deserved better. Miller knew this would be an uphill battle, but he became increasingly frustrated with Kassar’s resistance to the idea.
As he worked to get this pushed through, Miller shared the idea with his closest friends at the company—Dave Crane, Larry Kaplan, and Bob Whitehead, all of whom also felt dissatisfied with the current structure. They believed the artist’s contract to be a more fair way of compensating them for their hard work, especially as Atari continued to grow at astronomical rates, but they had a hard time seeing it as something that would be immediately implemented. They joined forces and began petitioning for support in their management, which was initially well received but then fell flat, leaving them stuck in a difficult place: they didn’t feel valued, but they had nowhere else to go.
Using the internal memo to calculate the direct value they brought to Atari that year, the four men made one final attempt at negotiating with Kassar. They drafted a proposal for their desired contracts that included profit sharing and the ability to take credit for their work, claiming that the four of them had been directly responsible for more than $60 million of Atari’s $100 million in VCS software revenue that year, but had received less than $100,000 in compensation. They weren’t asking for the world—they weren’t naive, and knew that value isn’t passed through in full to the creator—but felt there was a common ground more equitable to both parties.
Kassar, unimpressed with their proposal, declined and, according to a 2007 interview with David Crane for Gamasutra, told them, “You are no more important to Atari than the person on the assembly line who puts the cartridge in the box.” They knew there was nothing left for them at Atari; they could stay, but Kassar’s ever-evolving influence over the company had left a bad taste in their mouths, and they knew there had to be something better out there. Crane and Miller left that same year; Kaplan and Whitehead stayed just a bit longer, hoping things would improve.
At the time, Atari was the home console market leader by a long shot, and they knew that going to a competitor would be torture after having the freedoms they had experienced at Atari. They were conflicted. Eventually, Crane and Miller had an idea. What if they didn’t have to go work for someone else? What if they could work for themselves, implementing the change they wanted to see in how people were compensated, and still make games for the VCS?
This was completely unheard of at the time, as Atari was the sole provider of games to the platform; the company didn’t allow other people to make games for the platform because that would risk cutting into its sales. The idea of third parties had existed with other computer systems, as they were much more open platforms, but never in gaming. If you wanted to compete with Atari, you released your own system. It was risky, but Crane and Miller believed it could be rewarding in a massive way. Plus, they kind of wanted to stick it to Kassar and knew just how to do it.
In October 1979 Crane, Kaplan, Miller, and Whitehead founded Activision; they were quickly funded, setting off to work immediately on their own titles that would run on the VCS platform. This angered Kassar, and he quickly filed a suit against the company claiming that their intimate knowledge of the VCS was property of Atari and that they were wrongfully using it to profit. Atari lost, and Activision went on to release its own games, to much acclaim.
This series of events left many Atari programmers wondering if they had better options, and many of the original programmers from the Bushnell era ended up leaving for other opportunities. They might be making $35,000 at Atari, but other companies would pay them twice that to come make games for them—for many programmers, it just made too much sense to leave. As the market began to open up, they knew they had more options than ever.
For others, the thought of working at Atari was worth the short-term cash loss. Many of them were new programmers who didn’t have much experience and knew the opportunity to work there and learn from the best was more valuable than an increase in salary. It was early in their career, and they knew that in an industry so young, knowledge would be key to their long-term success. Besides, the longer you worked at Atari, the more credibility you established in the industry. They clearly believed in the long-term viability, so why not just wait it out?
Plus, they liked the increased competition. With more games releasing every year, the whole field was growing. Sure, there was a chance that their slice of the pie might get smaller, but if another game got someone interested in one of theirs down the road, that seemed like a win. Not only that, but Activision’s main mission was to do things that Atari would never have let them do; the programmers weren’t exactly sure of what that meant at the time, but they knew that Activision had to do something different if it wanted to beat Atari, and they wanted to be able to counteract that.
Watching from afar as the drama with the Consumer Division and Kassar went down, Atari’s Coin-Op programmers knew this was their chance to shine. Theirs was a much smaller team and didn’t have to worry about cartridge sales, so while it did bug them a bit that they didn’t share in the company’s success, they remained mostly unaffected and pushed forward. Though most of 1978–89 had been focused on the VCS, Coin-Op had steadily been putting out new hits like Asteroids, Lunar Lander, and Super Breakout that would take years to replicate for the VCS.
They kept to themselves, remaining true to the focus on entertainment and innovation that Bushnell had set all those years ago. They knew that coin-op gaming would eventually be surpassed by home console gaming as technology advanced and became more cost-efficient, but that didn’t stop them from pushing the envelope and continuing to innovate in ways previously not thought possible.
Little did they know that they were just beginning to create what would later come to be known as the golden age of arcade gaming, taking over the hearts and minds of the nation and forming the basis for what would soon become a multibillion-dollar industry.