Atari Inc.: Business is Fun

by Marty Goldberg, Curt Vendel

Atari Inc. - Business is Fun, the book that goes behind the company that was synonymous with the popularization of 'video games.'

Nearly 8 years in the making, Atari Inc. - Business is Fun is comprised of thousands of researched documents, hundreds of interviews, and access to materials never before available.

An amazing 800 pages (including nearly 300 pages of rare, never before seen photos, memos and court documents), this book details Atari's genesis from an idea between an engineer and a visionary in 1969 to a nearly $2 billion dollar juggernaut, and ending with a $538 million death spiral during 1984. A testament to the people that worked at this beloved company, the book is full of their personal stories and insights. Learn about topics like:

* All the behind the scenes stories surrounding the creation of the company's now iconic games and products.

* The amazing story of Atari's very own "Xerox PARC" research facility up in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains

* The full recounting of Steve Jobs's time at Atari, with comments from the people he worked with on projects and the detailed story of the creation of Atari Breakout, including input by Steve Wozniak on his development of the prototype, and how it couldn't be used and another Atari engineer would have to make the final production Breakout arcade game instead.

* The creation of "Rick Rats Big Cheese Restaurants" which later became "Chuck E. Cheese's"

* How Atari Inc. faltered and took down an entire industry with it before being put on the chopping block.

If you've ever wanted to learn about the truth behind the creation of this iconic company told directly by the people who made FUN for a living, then this is the book for you!

Genres: Video Games, Games, History, Business, Nonfiction, Ebooks, Technology

800 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 2012

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sure, it's self published. But it's also the most poorly written and edited book I've ever read. It was a struggle to finish to book as I reached the end. Every two or three pages had some kind of error or mistake. If that doesn't keep pulling you out of the book, the inconsistent tense (they tried to keep it all in present tense, but fail) and the lack of focus will.

The lack of similar comments from readers and reviewers is shocking. It's like they really didn't read the book or can't see the errors. Both of those possibilities are scary to me.

Tons of unique research, interviews, and primary documents. Bad writing. Bad storytelling. Bad editing.

It's a shame...but a must have for a diehard.
Here's hoping a second edition will improve it!

[Themistocles · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a bad, bad book.

To begin with, it didn't catch my eye; cheaply bound, like you could do at any photo copying shop. Well, it's self-published so something like that is to be expected, but for the price it's not good.

Opening it I saw something expected, but not justified; like other self-published books on the retro-computing scene, it's "typeset" in Word. Or something. And it shows. Ugh.

So that's just appearances, one could get over them, but...

The writers absolutely Can. Not. Write. The text is of a level at par with that of a high school student. A not very good student. To begin with, the text is full of typos. I don't mean a typo here and there, but rather a couple on every single page. Typos, misspellings and grammar mistakes are so often to be found I got bored of cringing. There are sentences that don't even make any sense at all, like the writer started revising it and didn't read it through; or maybe the phone rung and he picked up again without re-reading. What's more, tenses are changed all the time from past to present and future, many a time even within the same sentence.

The whole chapter on Cyan is a mess; just random notes thrown together, 55 pages of them, without the least effort of putting them into something coherent (to be fair, the authors claim this is a 'feature' :D )

So, the book is ugly and the writing is excruciatingly bad and hasn't been edited or proofed even once before going to print. Contrast it with Mechner's The Making of Prince of Persia that I read just after this, written by a 20yo Mechner in the form of a diary and you'll see some sharp contrast... Still, is it worth reading?

Well... let me put it this way: if you don't know anything about Atari, then probably yes. If you've been following the retro scene and have been reading stuff here and there, like I have (and I'm not even a fan of the early Atari), then there's little new to learn. Most of it of little interest - they moved from this building to that one, or personal side stories that are not relevant or specific to Atari and happen everywhere. The authors don't go very deep, and that's probably because they don't know how companies work (a budget meeting "a typical meeting to wrap the year up"? Yeah, only if it wasn't the single most important meeting of the year for a company! Or, "OMG! a rubber mallet in the production line!" - quite a useful and frequently used tool, actually), so they don't know what and how to probe. The fact that they keep making fun of Marketing (with no coverage of its people and results) shows a blind-sighted partiality that verges on stupidity. 25-odd pages on Chuck-E-Cheese? Ehhh....

In short, they totally fail to give a complete image of Atari, even though they plow through 800 pages of text and photos. Timelines are vague, stories not interesting (well, except for the people involved, probably, but even in that regard I've read much better ones) and technical descriptions (even in the chapters with the *sneer* technical warning) are extremely basic. The authors do make an effort to drum up interest in silly ways ("ohhh look now, we're going to tell you something that no one knew before, and it's really funny, lolz"), but always for mundane bits. Their self-important tone ("we know where those cartridges are buried, but we're not going to tell you") is cringe-worthy at best.

Lots of photos. The vast majority of them falls into two categories: stuff you can find online and photos of faces, faces, faces and more faces or buildings. Nice page-fillers! The rest are at times very interesting and never seen before indeed, but are too few and far between. Pagination is also awful, with captions on the wrong page, printed twice or omitted altogether.

It's such a shame that it ends before the company releases the ST series (of which I'm a fan). I'll think twice before buying the two other volumes announced...

[jersey9000 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up with Atari. One of my earliest memories is playing the original Pong, and when we were kids I also remember all the other kids around coming over to play our 2600. To this day in my storage unit I have a 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar (with Jag CD!) with hundreds of games for them. Needless to say, I am an Atari type of dude, so this book was a wonderful treat for me.

It takes you from the earliest beginnings of Atari, back when it was three dudes and called Syzygy, and ends with the sale of Atari to the Tramiel family. From start to finish it was w wild ride, for sure. While many of these stories were vaguely familiar to me, there were many, many details I had never heard before. I loved hearing the stories about all the experimentation that was going on. The birth and death of Kermit the robot was great- I had never heard about that before. The thought process behind all the design decisions for the home systems and arcade cabinets was something that I was really interested in. All of these is backed up by a copious amount of pictures, technical documents,internal memos, and wonderful, in depth quotes from most of the players at the time. Hearing from Ted Dabney for the first time was great.

This is a huge book. A book this size, with such a focus on technical issues, would risk losing the audience under a mountain of details, but the crisp writing and great pacing (they frequently jump a bit back and forth in time, with interviews strung throughout) ensures that you never, as a reader, get a chance to feel bored or confused by the tech talk. At around 700 pages (reading it on my kindle, so not exactly sure of the size), with tons of great stories and interviews, by the time I was done I felt like I had lived through the rise and fall of Atari myself. This book is a must have for anyone who is a fan of (or curious about) the roots of video gaming. These are the guys who essentially created an industry, and changed the world. I am glad this story has finally been told in such an objective, thorough way.

When the book ends there is definitely a "wait, then what happened?" feeling, but I have been told that will be part of the next book in the series. I can't wait to read it :)

[Karl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't in good conscience write a glowing review of this book. In the past decade the computer book field seems to be flooded with these slapadash affairs that are banged together in ten minutes and rushed to press for cash. This book is much along these lines. It is horribly edited. It is doubtful these guys even proofread their writing once. A quick scan would have come up with hundreds of mispellings poorly constructed sentences and bad word usage errors. The book has lots of pictures mostly black and white. While the pictures are interesting at times they seem mostly to exist as filler. While the book is over 800 pages long well over 200 is probably pictures. It lacks an index and is probably because these guys don't know how to create one. I have written and read my share of dissertations I know how to pad a document for heft and know what a padded document looks like. This has all the feel of a C level effort at best. If I were editing this I would have thrown it back at them and demanded a rewrite. They needed to clean up what they had, pare down the superfluous material and apply a bit of effort towards more detail. The fact that they are coming out with a second edition of this clearly indicates that the book is flawed. It should never have been printed it is a substandard first draft as it stands. I do hope the second edition is better than the first. In the parlance of computerese this is very beta-ish.

[Irish Rat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it halfway through this book, which is impressive considering the 3rd grade level grammar going on here. Tenses change partway through sentences almost every other sentence, and whole sentences are ambiguous in meaning because basic grammar hasn't been applied. I wish I could read the rest of it, since there's so much interesting technical information, but alas.

[Graham Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

The authors have evidently done a lot of research, but the book is really poorly edited. In addition to typos and other errors there are rapid changes of tense and style, as well as shifts from one time to another that make it hard to follow.

[Mark Paterson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Atari VCS 'woodie' was my first step into a hobby which I still enjoy to this day some thirty (God, I'm old) years later, so I was very much looking forward to reading this. Sadly, it was a massive disappointment.

I was expecting great insight into the iconic Atari products and how they were conceived in a time where the company was pretty much a pioneer, trailblazing a whole new form of entertainment with no rivals or equals. Instead it skimped on details, filled reams of text full of confusing techno-babble and whole chapters covering dull managerial conflicts and corporate reshuffles that nobody could possibly care any less about – 'Business is Fun' indeed.

There were two authors credited with writing the book and it did show as the timeline skipped around with situations and subjects repeated. In places, it felt like a collection of badly written articles cobbled together in a book.

The worst part was that neither of the authors seemed to have read or spell checked their own work at all, or employed a proofreader for that matter. I had a legitimately bought download of the book and yet it was littered with typos, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes – I swear there was at least one misspelling of the word 'Atari'. It really took me out of the story and made me want to get my teacher's red pen out and correct it. See me after class.

On the plus side, I did like the selection of photographs that accompanied the conclusion of each chapter. They really captured that era when everything was avocado green, wood veneered and dressed in nylon. Though these could also have been presented a lot better – they looked like they were in a child's scrapbook.

This was optimistically labeled 'Volume 1' and despite its sloppiness, I would be still interested in reading the further history of the company, though this time with a editor firmly cracking the whip.

[Rob · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was such a disappointment.

- It was very hard to follow. Some parts of the book move at a very slow pace, going into minute detail. Later on, significant events are skipped over and changes not mentioned are referenced in past tense.

- Many grammatical errors. Randomly placed periods, poor capitalization, and misspellings. Unfortunately, this was too common and occurred on almost every page.

- Finally, the amount of cliches and changes in tone made this very difficult to read.

[Matt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lots of good information covered with spelling errors and punctuation errors.

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given this more stars than many other people who have reviewed it.

Whilst the content of the book was interesting and largely accurate, there are spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes and just downright stupid mistakes (like duplicate sentences) on EVERY SINGLE PAGE.

How a book can go out in this day and age in such condition baffles the mind, it must have been proof read by either Stevie Wonder or Maddie McCann because this book would not have got past anyone who had read it!

A computer spell check would have thrown up 80%+ of the errors, so I can only deduce this book was written in Notepad.

An interesting read which loses all credibility when authors who were supposed to have been part of one of the biggest computer firms of all time can't even write a page of text without errors.

There are supposed to be 2 more volumes, don't think I'll bother!

[Phil Roat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a very detailed and interesting history of Atari up until the company was split and partially sold.

The only disappointment I’ll is that the 2nd and 3rd books that were planned to follow it up haven’t ever materialised.

[Eric Bauman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had some interesting stories, but seriously needed a proofreader.

[Roger Asbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a child of the 70s and 80s. Like many from that time, I spent uncountable hours in front of an Atari 2600, playing the popular games of the time. From Pac-Man and Pitfall, to Combat and oh so many others, I was an addict to them all.

I picked this book up hoping to learn about the company behind my entertainment. On that score, I wasn't really disappointed. The book is packed with history and the stories behind the interesting, if not deeply flawed, personalities that made up the Atari company.

What I had a hard time getting past was the absolutely abysmal lack of editing. This is an excellent book held back by lack of proof reading, repetitious content and poor grammar. Part of me wants to believe some of the egregious and repetitious errors - such as the abundance of sentences starting with lower case letters - are the results of poor conversion to ebook software. But even so, why publish it in that state?

Would I recommend this book? Only to die-hard Atari fans who might see the errors as quirky, or ironic, reflections on the brand.

[Felipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I worked for Y! in the late ninties and first few years of the 2000ś i personally enjoyed these book becouse the atmosphere that ran throught atari is the same we breathed in y! at that time.
It helped me understand the basics of silicon valley culture and why some modern companies are still ruled by these beginnings.

[Shirley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Summarizes the conditions under which Atari games were first developed - and launched an industry. Not as tightly edited as some books out there (was self-published), but has historical details not available elsewhere. If you want to understand the roots of today's game industry, is an essential read.

[Jose L. Marra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting read for any entrepreneur

As an aspiring entrepreneur, this book was a great look at a small group of visionaries who grew a company from a tiny seed into s huge tree. Read this if you like stories of people who changed the world as we know it.

[Klas Olsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandatory read for Atari fans

Interesting documentation of an essential company in the video game and early home computing industry. There are some typos and other mistakes additional proofreading should take care of, but despite this, it’s a great read for an Atari fan

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed learning the history of the first video game company.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good history of Atari with some interesting historical information that assists to understand the events that brought us Atari.

[Brian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Damn near unreadable but has a lot of interesting (for a game geek) facts.

[Andrew Wheeler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably the most poorly-edited book I've ever read, but it was still hugely entertaining. There's tons of great history, particularly during the first half of the book.