My friend Chris O’Donnell linked to a wonderful online history of the Atari company, makers of the first wildly-popular home video games. It tells of how Nolan Bushnell, Silicon Valley legend and founder of Atari, sold the company to Warner Communications and then regretted the move when he was forced out. Warner went on to squeeze billions of dollars out of Atari but also squeezed the creativity out of it too, chiefly by not giving game developers a cut of their creations’ huge profits.
I’ve always been fascinated by the history of Atari, but this was an eye-opening look at how Warner does business. The suits at Warner didn’t understand computers and software (and arguably still don’t), so they ran Atari like they would the monopolistic record business. Warner wanted to own the platform, top-to-bottom, and sue anyone who dared write software for their Atari VCS. They were greedy bastards even then.
The game company Activision was created by the wizard developers who were driven from Atari by this clueless management style. They faced lawsuits from Warner for creating their games but ultimately prevailed, writing better games to boot.
I’d argue that since Ataris were in every home long before PCs were, Atari is the company that paved the way for the PC revolution (Atari employees actually helped build the Apple I, according to a Steve Jobs biography). Regardless, every software company in existence today owes something to those pioneers at Atari.