Words matter. These are the best Atari Quotes from famous people such as Burnie Burns, Rachel Dratch, Nolan Bushnell, Bobby Kotick, Ernest Cline, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have been playing video games since the Atari 2600 days.
When I was little, we used to have Atari.
In 1980, Atari was bringing in around two billion dollars in revenue and Chuck E. Cheese’s some five hundred million. I still didn’t feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple – although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.
In the mid 1980s, video games as an industry had lost its way a bit. Atari had collapsed. There was this widespread collective belief that it was because video games were a fad.
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.
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.
While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.
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.
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.
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.
I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.
When I was super young, I had an Atari and used to play ‘Space Invaders.’ Then I fell in love with ‘Mario Bros.,’ ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ and ‘Yoshi’ on Super Nintendo. I was quite a bit of a gamer as a kid when I think about it.
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.
I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.
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.
My family went Intellivision instead of Atari. I would go over to my friends’ houses to play their Ataris and was so jealous of that. I don’t remember them ever being jealous that I had the Intellivision.
I restore vintage Atari XY arcade video game machines.
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.
I’m a film maker who started on the Atari and then went onto the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. So I possibly have a different sensibility to people who didn’t play games growing up.
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.
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.
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.
