8 ms·
Atari in 1983 went from the leader in video game production to completely imploding. In 1979, four of their best programmers left after demanding equity in the
by zomgbbq 4y ago
Atari in 1983 went from the leader in video game production to completely imploding. In 1979, four of their best programmers left after demanding equity in the sales and were refused. Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". They left and formed Activision which led to a sequence of failures by Atari until they finally died unable to compete with the likes of Intellivision, Colecovision, and Commodore.
- orange_joe 4y agowhat's incredible about this is that Activision remains an industry leader whereas I'm not entirely sure if Atari even still exists.
- denkmoon 4y agoIronically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.
- Gigachad 4y agoClearly the situation is very different. Activision is much much bigger than Atari was. 4 of the top developers leaving wouldn't cause the company to implode.
- Brian_K_White 4y agopercentages duh
- boredtofears 4y agoThe more I learn about game dev the less I think this is true. The number of programmers that can work on bleeding edge game engine tech is incredibly low and the learning curve has only gotten more severe over time. I mean, I'm sure they wouldn't implode, but I bet they pay their core engine devs a more than decent wage.
- sudosysgen 4y agoThe majority of devs don't work on bleeding edge game engine tech, though.
- boredtofears 4y agoOf course, but presumably the top coders at a game shop are involved in whatever inhouse tech they're building.
- rvanlaar 4y agoA top developer leaving also functions as a signal to others in the company. I once left a company quickly after a senior leader had left. That proved to be a good move since the company was going under and sold a few months after.
- Waterluvian 4y agoBut they might be right this time. Many game devs are fungible cogs, implementing a well-defined blueprint. Especially Activision games like Call of Duty. It doesn’t help that there’s just so many devs these days that they can seemingly abuse them for decades and nothing has collapsed.
- Kapura 4y agoif you'd ever worked on a call of duty you'd realize how foolish a statement this is.
- neatze 4y ago
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoSeems like you're speaking out of turn, and trying to pile in on some sort of weird meritless gatekeeping without doing any basic research first: https://github.com/ablakey https://github.com/ablakey
- neatze 4y agoThe reason I said this is because of "implementing a well-defined blueprint" it just compelled me to say something, I am not expert developer by any means,but it is like saying to a degree; paintings are all same because most of them use same colors, arguably writing prototype code is simple, but fixing bugs and tuning everything so game is fun and fluid is where hard part is.
- dahart 4y agoTry not to take it personally, there are both devs who are replaceable and devs who aren’t, and with ~40 Call of Duty titles on almost as many platforms, a million and one people have worked on it, some doing more mechanical port work than others. There’s truth in there; the games industry is tough, and it’s relevant that some studios that (for example) demand lots of overtime haven’t seen any large exodus, or sometimes there is high turnover and the studio still survives, to parent’s point. There’s a higher level layer to this, that from a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of smaller studios that are easily replaceable, and I’d speculate studios go out of business over contracts lost to other studios far more often than over employee walkouts (which of course fuels the need for overtime to be competitive). This is true for games and for VFX production in the US, enough people want these jobs that high turnover doesn’t seem to slow the business.
- Rapzid 4y agoNo way they don't pay bank the bulk of their irreplaceable programers.
- xwdv 4y agoIt’s justified though. Games are basically a solved problem these days, and the developers of today are most of the time just building on abstractions and best practices that didn’t exist during Atari’s time. Once a particular domain of software becomes sufficiently mature, there is no real opportunity for heroic programmers to emerge who become too valuable to replace. Eventually more people emerge who are just as good.
- danieltanfh95 4y agoI very much doubt that. There's a reason why innovation in games often happen, entertainment is not an easy problem to solve, with no set quantity to achieve
- lmz 4y agoWhile "solved" is a bit optimistic, it is also true that e.g. sports games get sales every year with mainly updates to the player roster.
- Ekaros 4y agoOr many locked in formulas. Think CoD, BF somewhat, Assassin's Creed. Whatever Ubisoft does.
- KptMarchewa 4y agoDecent amount of BF games flopped. Assassin's Creed had three "reboots" of the formula. Ubisoft recently realized they have to shake things up, since flops are more and more common.
- chii 4y agoit depends on what the poster meant by "games" - do they mean engine and graphics? Or do they mean game design/mechanics? Game engines and graphics is "solved" if you stick to popular concepts (which are those that are easily available in commercial engines). Game design/mechanics is an unsolved problem imho - unless you consider it solved when merely taking an existing game design (like an FPS) and add nothing new to it (aka, those yearly COD military shooters). Consider a game like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Taiji/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Taiji/ (inspired by the witness). This game is quite unique, and cannot really be recycled in to another game (without it being just a clone).
- walrus01 4y agoVideo game studios taking advantage of young, naive people who will burn themselves out working unpaid overtime for the privilege of working for a game studio? I'm absolutely shocked, shocked I tell you! Some of them probably get 50 applicants for every position they advertise. It's a meat grinder.
- diob 4y agoVideo game developers (and working class in general) desperately needs to unionize, young folks are too naive to realize they're working towards chronic health conditions.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoIn a sense, some do - by quitting and/or going indie. There's some good studios out there; Team Cherry (hollow knight) famously doesn't do crunch. They also don't (need to) make any announcements about games until they're ready.
- wikfwikf 4y agoMy sister is a vet. She works in a normal vet practice in our city dealing with mainly cats and dogs. Once I asked her why she doesn't work as a vet in the zoo, an extremely prestigious and wealthy institution with zoological research, wide variety of animals, etc. She just said that all young vets want to be a vet in the zoo. So they have much worse pay and conditions than other vet jobs. Video game developers don't have terrible conditions and relatively low pay because of some anomalous lack of bargaining power which can be fixed by unionization. They have lots of bargaining power, most of which they use to choose the industry they work in. There are lots of young men who want to work in games, and far fewer who want to work in financial software. So pay and conditions are far worse in games, to the point where supply meets demand in each type of development work.
- coolandsmartrr 4y agoLooks like they were facing extinction in 1991 until now-CEO Bobby Kotick took over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#Purchase_by_Bobby_Kotick_(1991%E2%80%931997) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#Purchase_by_Bobby_K...
- MrMember 4y ago>Kotick and additional investors bought Mediagenic for approximately $500,000 in 1991. Wow,that's one hell of a successful investment.
- walrus01 4y agoatari very much does not exist, the trademark/name has passed through like 3 or 4 different hands now. whatever corporate entity is now calling itself atari has absolutely no relationship to the original.
- gabereiser 4y agoThis is correct. Nolan Bushnell sold the brand to WMS Industries in 1996.
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoAtari still exists today. In 2018 I met Frédéric Chesnais in NY, and learned about the latest things related the company. Here's an interview I found from 2019. [0]. It seems that the current CEO is now Wade Rosen. [1] Company is still up and running. [0]: https://frenchamerican.org/interview-frederic-chesnais/ https://frenchamerican.org/interview-frederic-chesnais/ [1]: https://venturebeat.com/games/atari-ceo-wade-rosen-interview-returning-to-classic-video-game-roots/ https://venturebeat.com/games/atari-ceo-wade-rosen-interview...
- shp0ngle 4y agoIt’s just a shell that rents the name to whoever gives them the most, right? There is “atari NFT” and “atari blockchain casino”
- eloisant 4y agoNot really, it's a French video game company (Infogrames) that bought Atari when it was just a shadow of its former self and rebranded itself Atari. Anyway no relation to the original Atary.
- vintermann 4y agoNo, the Atari name exists today. Famous defunct company names regularly get bought by entities wanting to cash out whatever goodwill or positive associations still left in them. Would-be buyers with less extractive ambitions can't compete in the auctions. So no, Atari doesn't exist today, what exists is a company wearing Atari's skin as a suit, in order to fool you. Don't be fooled by names without the organisational continuity to back it up.
- zo1 4y agoAnother famous example of this "brand" re-use that I only recently found out about: AEG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEG
- 4y ago
- scarface74 4y agoOr it could have been caused by the whole video game crash of 1983 and not four employees leaving…
- readme 4y agothe irony is that the CEO probably does less work than the assembly line worker
- RajT88 4y agoA lot of CEO's at places I have worked didn't really make decisions. They schmooze the biggest customers. Constantly, 12-14 hours a day.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoIt's also on them to manage, handle, and be responsible for everything. Walk a mile in their shoes and then try say it's so "easy" honestly.
- RajT88 4y agoI certainly wasn't suggesting they had an easy job. I agree it's quite a hard job. Just that it's not always the job some people think it is.
- darkerside 4y agoSchmooze is a bit of a demeaning word, isn't it? If the CEO is learning from customers and helping the organization react accordingly, that sounds very valuable.
- RajT88 4y agoSchmooze comes from yiddish, and it just means to chat or converse. Seems fair to me. You can chat and converse idly, or with an agenda. Not demeaning at all, just descriptive.
- darkerside 4y ago> talk with someone in a lively and friendly way Demeaning isn't the right word, but it sure seems condescending. Like calling programming "button pushing".
- coffeemug 4y agoIs there a book on this you can recommend?
- dnissley 4y agoInterestingly, this is kind of an anti-example of what was asked for in the OP. Here, few people quit, not many.
- zomgbbq 4y agoThis was the beginning of an avalanche that led to most of the remaining engineers at Atari to leave and try to start their own third-party game companies to follow in the success of Activision.
- mdcds 4y agoOP here. I assumed that many people needed to quit for a company to implode. turns out I was wrong!
- senko 4y ago> Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought.
- deckard1 4y agotoday they have their scrum masters whisper it in our ears at the daily stand up
- mk89 4y agoAhaha this just made my day :)
- xxs 4y agono scrum mumbo:jumbo in daily meetings; only engineers
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI feel like software developers have either the biggest or the smallest egos; the majority is in the last category and will keep their head down. But in companies, all the managerial staff - including these days scrum masters, which is now a dedicated role by a non-developer - will strut around like they own the place and everything would fall apart if it wasn't for them.
- YetAnotherNick 4y agoTo me honest and harsh conversation, even if it is wrong, is still better than firing 100s of employees in a zoom call with corporate speak.
- MikePlacid 4y ago> Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought. A daughter of my friend was not very happy in her job: a Silicon Valley company hired her as a security pro, but was using as a coder, which she hates. She was going to leave, but decided to wait ten months or so until her stock options vested. She and a big group of other engineers were fired right before the vesting moment. All this time the CEO was generating absolutely politically correct sounds: people are our best capital, diversity is our strength, etc. She would be better off if he was honest.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoGaming abounds with stories like this. A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor. Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth. As a result the top programmers, designers, etc, grouped up and negotiated a deal to become a 2nd party dev studio with a competing publisher. Nearly the entire company left with them. They couldn't take the IP with them so they rebranded their new game franchise as Call of Duty. That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.
- rvanlaar 4y agoWhat an interesting story. It made me look up how medal of honor started. Could you clarify a few things? I don't think the story adds up. Wikipedia has the followin information. Medal of Honor was made by DreamWorks interactive. [..] Filmmaker Steven Spielberg Spielberg founded DreamWorks Interactive in 1995. [1] And: Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. [2] This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_gam... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games Edit: It seems you were talking about the acclaimed: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Made by: 2015, inc[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games Edit 2: Spelling
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoYes, I'm talking about 2015. The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes. The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper. The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise. So yes, my story does in fact check out. Which is because I lived it. My friend tried to get me to join the team for 2 years because he knew they were onto something, but I'd fled a childhood in Kansas to build a life on the west coast and wasn't looking to move back to Tulsa of all places. That proved to be a bad career decision but I'm ok with it as a life decision. Can you have some self awareness of how annoying it is for you to adopt this skeptical fact checker tone when you have so little familiarity with the events and people involved you don't even really understand what to google for and which wikipedia articles to read? Edit: I'm annoyed because if you tell someone their story doesn't check out, calling me a lair in this case as the story is direct personal experience, you probably need more of a basis for that claim than googling a wikipedia article about a story you'd never heard of 5 minutes ago.
- gfxgirl 4y agoI agree 100% with much of the sentiment here that creators deserve respect and a cut of the spoils At the same time, it really depends.... I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any particular project it would probably die, but at least for AAA titles, there's usually no one person responsible for that title's success? Or maybe there is but it's limited to a few key people and not every person on that team. IF you're at some indie firm with 5-15 people that's probably less true. I mostly made this comment because in 1983 most games were made by 1 to 3 people max. By the end of the 80s there weren't many games that had more than 20 people on them and usually they took less than a year to make. It was only in the mid 90s that we started getting 30+ people teams trying to fill a CD with data and it arguably wasn't until the 2000s that we had games that it was common to teams of 30-100+ people multiple years to make.
- siscia 4y agoI see stories like this a few times. But oftentimes management ask if the project will be completed at all. And yes, the project will be completed. But the real question to ask is often: Will it be completed on time? On budget? With the same quality level? And this is a complete different story.
- neffy 4y agoIf you take the truly non-performing folks, well sad to say you can probably get rid of most of them and improve performance. Otherwise, get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation before they get up to speed with your particular application/code base/equipment. Can easily be more than a year - especially with some of the big systems. So yes there is an impact on business performance, and a highly damaging one, far more often than is realised. Companies compete - and companies go under and get replaced, all the time.
- ChrisLomont 4y ago>get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation On a big project, say 100 devs over 3 years, 6 man months is 1/600th of the work, so a single person is replaceable and it's not even noise. If the replacement takes 6 months to get up to speed the replacement is certainly not a very good developer, even on the biggest projects. At that size, there's lots of small side projects, testing groups, and the like, so there should be plenty of smaller pieces to work on, and some on those small projects are always happy to jump into the main work, not needing 3-6 months to be useful to it. This is not highly damaging on any but the smallest, shortest projects. And even there people move around all the time and don't destroy projects.
- gabereiser 4y agoAnd let’s not forget that the great Woz and Jobs were once Atari employees who left to start a new company called Apple.
- a-dub 4y agoi thought there was an industrywide videogame crash in the early 80s that was blamed on the atari consoles being too open. (everyone was making cartridges, even companies like ralston-purina, quality fell under the flooded market and consumers gave up). my understanding is that this gave rise to nintendo's tight control over developer licensees while atari was sold off and pivoted to home computers (specifically the st line) under jack tramiel.
- ido 4y agoThe story is more complex than that, Atari split in 2 (the games company and the consumer electronics company) and neither really exist anymore (and haven't for a long time now). But basically yes - they never replicated the success of the VCS and arcades stopped being a major part of the industry in the 90s. All of Atari's biggest hits were in the 70s and (early) 80s.
- a-dub 4y agoit's really complex, and quite interesting! "Video game crash of 1983 - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
- justin66 4y agoAtari 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pinewurst 4y agoI’d read that Kassar actually compared the programmers with towel designers, having come from Burlington Industries (a textile company) himself.