Learn Why Business Is Fun

During our interviews, no matter what generation of employees we talked to, the theme was a common one: Atari was a unique place to work that these individuals never experienced again. A ‘lightning in a bottle’ experience that many spent a lifetime trying to replicate in their future employment, but were never able to.

Whether it was the coin-op employees from the 70s who worked hard and played even harder… or the consumer employees from the 80s glory days of the 2600, the unanimous consensus was nowhere else could they have put in so much blood, sweat, and tears and be joyful in every single second of it? Where else could they go to work and have been expected to play games for a living?

Make no mistake, pioneering new entertainment technology was hard work. But Atari afforded a unique, creative environment that championed letting off steam as much as it was a place of intellectual stimulation.

Regardless if they were working the assembly line, engineering the latest game, or managing the up-and-coming billion dollar company, those fun (and sometimes outrageous!) employee memories are all reflected in this book.

Insights

Today, people ask, “Do you play video games?” but in the 70s and 80s, people asked, “Do you play ATARI?” The video game historian team of Martin Goldberg and Curt Vendel have poured their blood, sweat and lifelong passion into writing the definitive book on the history of the very first video game industry icon, Atari. Hundreds of pages and over seven years in the making, ‘Atari Inc. – Business Is Fun’ is the TRUE, unvarnished accounting of a brand that became not just a household name, but a cultural phenomenon.

Goldberg and Vendel’s goal was to create a lasting tribute to the unsung heroes who created the Atari legacy, but through the course of their interviews and painstaking research, wound up having just as much fun compiling the history as the people who lived the history did. Thousands of original documents and internal resources were procured in the creation of this book and intertwined with hundreds of interviews with former Atari employees and company founders – ALL in a concentrated effort to document exactly what it was like to work at one of the most influential electronic entertainment companies of all time.

Atari Inc. – Business Is Fun is an entertaining and enlightened adventure, taking the reader on as close to a first-person journey as they can possibly experience, providing never-before told stories by the people that worked there, exposing the reader to the hearts and souls that created the company – the real lives that unfolded within its hallways, rather than just recanting the usual facts, figures, and lore which has been repeated over and over in so many prior publications. Regardless of whether you’re a ‘gamer geek’ or an aficionado of biographies, history or corporate intrigue, Atari Inc. – Business Is Fun has it all – and offers readers an unparalleled look into the inner workings of what it was like to work in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s… and what it was like to work at the most outrageous and innovative company founded to date whose sole intent was to create FUN for a living!