[kabdib]

It helps when the engineers are given proper resources. I'm guessing there wasn't anyone in Marketing trying to maximize profits at the cost of game quality.

ET with double the ROM and six months of development time would probably have been an awesome game. 2600 Pac-Man (AKA "Flickerman") wouldn't have generated so many returns and would have been fun to play.

I showed up in late October of 1982 and was told that Marketing wanted the cartridge I'd been assigned on the shelves by Christmas. Even this completely green college drop-out knew that was utterly flapping impossible, yet there were people over in the Marketing building who apparently thought it was a reasonable request.

I had a guy from Marketing in my office asking if I could print out every possible 8x8 bitmap for him. He wanted to copyright them so the competition couldn't use them in their games. I pointed out that the bitmaps would have be printed in color as well, then told him the story about what the inventor of the game of Chess asked for when the King wanted to reward him for coming up with the game.

By 1984 (and maybe earlier than that) Atari was losing $2M a day. The new 5200 console was plagued by terrible (yet totally fixable) design decisions. Plans for next-generation (e.g., 68000-based) were being flubbed, but we didn't know that yet. Serial layoffs had everyone pretty demoralized (we usually found out about these from the San Jose Mercury News, often on the mornings of said layoffs).