Originally Posted by
Steve W
Before Ray Kassar, there was no third-party development. He was such a bastard to the programmers, thinking of them as primadonnas who don't deserve getting credit or royalties on the games they worked on, that forced all their decent programmers to jump ship and do it on their own. The programmers were making something like $18,000 a year and their games were bringing in millions for a company that treated them like they were worthless. Kassar basically built the foundation for the 1984 American video game industry crash and started the flood of poor quality third-party games that choked the store shelves.
I always wonder what would have happened if Atari had a different manager who wasn't an asshat and instead treated their people well. Who knows, Atari would have been the only company making games for their systems and the designers would receive credit and royalties from their titles. Instead of the company becoming the unmanageable behemoth that lost Warner half a billion dollars in 1983 they instead properly transitioned to the next generation console smoothly, and we'd now be playing games on Atari's latest system rather than thinking of them as a relic of the '80s.