In the early 80s I worked at Atari in a small group doing "arcade conversion" cartridges for Atari's line of home computers. I've written about this elsewhere (

In the early 80s I worked at Atari in a small group doing "arcade conversion" cartridges for Atari's line of home computers. I've written about this elsewhere (not going to pimp my blog), but all this really meant was that Atari's marketing folks negotiated a license deal . . . and that was it. No technical help at all. No listings, no talking to the development team, nothing -- we just played the game a lot, got good at it, and did our own interpretation (usually it had to fit on a 16K cartridge). While I probably would have killed for listings like this for the titles I worked on (Defender wasn't one of them, btw), it's quite possible that not having the technical help meant that we wound up doing a better job on our versions because we had to get a good feel for the original one.