[justin66]

Atari collapsed under its own weight because of some pretty profound mismanagement, which led to massive layoffs. (you mentioned in another comment that engineers “left in an avalanche.” The word is “layoff”) There were plenty of extremely capable designers and engineers (and researchers) who were let go in a very short period of time, people who had not gone off to do their own thing. Atari was big.

If anything, other companies making good games for their platform aided them, and they were famously bad at seeing that. Engineers leaving to develop Atari software didn’t move the needle in terms of their collapse. Not giving individual credit on games is a tiny footnote in the book of things Atari management did wrong.