Atari Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, 'Everyone who's ever taken a shower has had an idea, It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference. — Mark Batterson

Atari is a very sad story. — Steve Wozniak

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

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

became one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a technician for $5 an hour. "In retrospect, it was — Walter Isaacson

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

Colossal Cave (also known as Adventure - not to be confused with the Atari VCS game of the same name) was developed by assembly-language programmer William Crowther — Anonymous

While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari. — Steven Sinofsky

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

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

It's all ka-ka, saying mind is really brain. Sure, my hand is in my pocket. Is my pocket my hand? Every wino on M Street knows a thought is a thought and not some cells or chazerei going on in the brain. They know that jealousy is not some kind of game from Atari. — William Peter Blatty

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Nolan Bushnell

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Jobes called anybody. He was fearless. When he was very young, he had no filter. He would call the president of Hewlett-Packard and the head of Atari and say, 'I'm Steve Jobs.' He just didn't take no for an answer. — Joshua Michael Stern

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. — Amber Rose

Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work. — Nolan Bushnell

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be. — Colson Whitehead

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

AL ALCORN. Chief engineer at Atari, who designed Pong and hired Jobs. GIL AMELIO. Became CEO of Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back. BILL ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Mac intosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs's girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa. LISA BRENNAN-JOBS. Daughter of Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer in New York City. NOLAN BUSHNELL. Founder of Atari and entrepreneurial role model for — Walter Isaacson

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

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

I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn't "have to worry about money.
I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It's crazy. I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let this money ruin my life."
Excerpt From: Walter, Isaacson. "Steve Jobs." Simon & Schuster, 2011-10-23T21:00:00+00:00. iBooks. — 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

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 little, we used to have Atari. — Rachel Dratch

Atari collapsed in '84, and I went freelance, and that was when I started spreading out and doing my own thing. I really cut loose and did a game called 'Trust and Betrayal', which was the first game solely about interpersonal relationships. — Chris Crawford

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

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

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

CONTENTS Epigraph Characters Introduction: How This Book Came to Be CHAPTER ONE Childhood: Abandoned and Chosen CHAPTER TWO Odd Couple: The Two Steves CHAPTER THREE The Dropout: Turn On, Tune In . . . CHAPTER FOUR Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design CHAPTER FIVE The Apple I: Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . . CHAPTER SIX — Walter Isaacson

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

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

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