Your position on former Atari owner Jack Tramiel???

[MagicMajenta]

Crafty Capitalist

OR

Person who singlehandedly dug Atari's grave?

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

Moving this one, as Cap'n Wrong often says, "on topic."

[it290]

He screwed Atari pretty badly, however he did pretty much build Commodore from the ground up. You've gotta admire the guy's achievements.

[MagicMajenta]

He screwed Atari pretty badly, however he did pretty much build Commodore from the ground up. You've gotta admire the guy's achievements.

Yeah you have a point. Although he tried to handle more than he could chew when he clashed with Commodore majority shareholder Irving Gould.

[MagicMajenta]

Oh yeah, The guy was also a Holocaust survivor so you gotta respect him for that.

[theoakwoody]

I think he was a man of great vision and that he did accomplish a lot with Atari. Although almost everyone will disagree with my previous statement you have to look at it from a business perspective instead of from the video game perspective. When Warner dumped atari they were losing millions a day until Tramiel came in and cut costs and turned the company around. Everyone bitches about the 7800 and its potential but I've read that the 7800 actually made quite a bit of money for atari with minimal effort put into development and marketing. Tramiel built commodore from the ground up and so his love was for computers. He wanted Atari to be his tool of revenge and to capture more market share than commodore/amiga. I realize that Atari computers were not big in the states but that they did very well in Europe. Tramiel chose not to be competitive in the console market but his failures in the computer market were out of his hands. Outside of IBM compatible PCs, and to some extent macs, there weren't many computers that didn't die in the late 80's early 90's. Once the "PC" was standardized and everyone chose to develop software for that platform the competitors, including commodore, fell out of contention.

So basically Tramiel thought computers would eventually become more mainstream but he didn't foresee everything becoming IBM compatible. This was his biggest mistake not the fact that he chose not to participate in console gaming.

I think that atari was in the same boat as Sega was in 1999 when they chose to give consoles one last shot. I'm glad that they went ahead with the dreamcast but it wasn't the smartest financial decision they could have made. Sega realized that they needed to go in a different direction and focus on developing and publishing games instead of hardware. Tramiel was trying to do the same thing by focusing more on computers but that didn't pan out for him in the long run.

[Graham Mitchell]

It's a tough call. I've also read he was kind of a dick to his employees, and he pushed to make the Commodores as cheaply as possible, which meant that they weren't very well made.

I realize he was ambitious in trying to get computers in every household, but I think that, at that time, there were many people trying to do the same thing. He got a lot of Commodores moved off the shelves, and wrecked Atari. I don't think there's a whole lot to commend him for in that if you consider that both Atari and Commodore are pretty much long gone at this point. Any impact he had was fleeting, and really only served to benefit him.

But that's just my pov.

[it290]

Yeah, but Commodore didn't tank until he was already long gone. He wasn't the only one trying to get stuff done cheaply, either - computers have never had much of a profit margin (except for Apple's Macintosh, and even they're lowering the bar now), so it's all about moving as many units as possible. I don't think that it was a wise move for Atari to try and focus on computers, though, and that was almost certainly a personally motivated decision. If nothing else, you can certainly say that he did make computers affordable for a whole lot of people who might not have been able to buy them otherwise -- consider that C64s were still very popular machines in many parts of the world up until the mid 90's or so.

[MagicMajenta]

I think he saw PCs as the future of gaming and that console gaming was a fad that would die out which is why he totally dissed the 7800 until it was too late. He couldn't imagine that console gaming would eventually be part of mainstream consumption. I think he threw Atari's consoles to the floor right? So that he could announce that Atari was going to focus on computers? Anyway he predicted wrong and console gaming would eventually become a multi billion market overtaking even the entertainment industry.