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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

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.

readme 4y ago
the irony is that the CEO probably does less work than the assembly line worker
- stavros 4y ago
  I don't know if it's less work, but certainly the assembly worker definitely delivers more value. Only one of the two killed the company.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    That kind of demonstrates the importance and value of a good CEO though. A couple dumb decisions by an assembly worker won't kill a company. A few bad decisions by a CEO can.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I think most job salaries can be linked directly to how much of a difference the employee can make. A complete dud at McDonalds in the kitchen might cost a few thousand on average but the further you go up, the greater the damage or benefit potential gets.
      - JadeNB 4y ago
        > I think most job salaries can be linked directly to how much of a difference the employee can make. I think that the world's, or at least the US's, teachers are a glaring counterexample.
        badpun 4y ago
        The problem is that the value that teachers create is hard to compute and hard to capture, so in the end, no one is willing to pay for it.
        specialist 4y ago
        David Graeber, of Bullshit Jobs fame, makes the distinction between service work and caring work. Doing things vs taking care of other humans. Part of his thesis is that society undervalues the labor of caring workers, because they get so much "job satisfaction". Teachers and nurses are examples of caring work. I lean towards Graeber's thesis, mostly because I haven't read any other explanation for this pathology, so Graeber wins by default.
        baud147258 4y ago
        > no one is willing to pay for it parents paying for private schools seem to be willing to pay that for their children
        quesera 4y ago
        Private school teachers are often paid less than public school teachers, and do not have a union or a pension.
        JadeNB 4y ago
        > parents paying for private schools seem to be willing to pay that for their children Exactly—people aren't willing to pay for someone else's education, but everyone needs an education, so teachers who care enough that they are willing to teach for minuscule pay wind up squeezed between societal apathy and societal need.
    - JadeNB 4y ago
      > That kind of demonstrates the importance and value of a good CEO though. A couple dumb decisions by an assembly worker won't kill a company. A few bad decisions by a CEO can. A few dumb (or malicious) decisions by an assembly worker can cause enormous damage and incur enormous cost.
    - eloisant 4y ago
      Except the bad CEO still gets a big salary, and a golden parachute when he leaves the sinking ship of the company he killed. And then proceed to get hired as CEO for the next company.
- RajT88 4y ago
  A 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 ago
    It'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 ago
      I 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 ago
        Schmooze 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 ago
        Schmooze 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".
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - 4y ago
- muzani 4y ago
  The effects of a CEO is often lagging. If an assembly line worker stops working, you see the results immediately. If a CEO stops working or does something very negative, you might see the effects years later. You'd think that losing key staff would kill the company overnight, but even in this situation, it took 4 years between being doomed and actually dying.
orange_joe 4y ago
what's incredible about this is that Activision remains an industry leader whereas I'm not entirely sure if Atari even still exists.
- denkmoon 4y ago
  Ironically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Clearly 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 ago
      percentages duh
    - boredtofears 4y ago
      The 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 ago
        The majority of devs don't work on bleeding edge game engine tech, though.
        boredtofears 4y ago
        Of course, but presumably the top coders at a game shop are involved in whatever inhouse tech they're building.
coffeemug 4y ago
Is there a book on this you can recommend?
- vitaflo 4y ago
  This is all laid out in the Nov 28, 1983 edition of InfoWorld Magazine.
  - chirau 4y ago
    pp. 151-158 https://books.google.com/books?id=sy8EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=sy8EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=fron...
dnissley 4y ago
Interestingly, this is kind of an anti-example of what was asked for in the OP. Here, few people quit, not many.
- zomgbbq 4y ago
  This 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 ago
  OP 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 ago
  today they have their scrum masters whisper it in our ears at the daily stand up
  - mk89 4y ago
    Ahaha this just made my day :)
  - xxs 4y ago
    no scrum mumbo:jumbo in daily meetings; only engineers
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I 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 ago
  To 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 ago
Gaming 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 ago
  What 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 ago
    Yes, 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 ago
I 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.
- Mc91 4y ago
  > 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 The thing is these two things are linked - one engineer leaving and 30-70% of a team leaving. The quantity of who leaves does not matter as much - a project may be able to handle 70% of consultants, interns, junior and regular programmers leaving, but might die if the 30% (or 25%, or 20%) leaving is entirely senior/staff/principal. One of the lead programmers who has been at the company for many years leaves. He is friendly with some of the other senior programmers and says he thinks the company is slowly going downhill, and he got a new job with better money, and with a saner schedule, work environment and work-life balance. Maybe one of the other senior people leaves for the company he left for. Then other senior people start leaving. It's like Steve Blank's essay about how a company deciding to start charging fifty cents for soda led to an exodus of its best senior programmers. One lead leaving can be a catalyst for others leaving. So they are in a sense irreplaceable. If a company is an oligopoly like Verizon/AT&T or the like, then they are privy to revenue and profits they don't have to compete for, and for companies in that situation people are more replaceable. Not for companies that have to be competitive though.
gabereiser 4y ago
And let’s not forget that the great Woz and Jobs were once Atari employees who left to start a new company called Apple.
scarface74 4y ago
Or it could have been caused by the whole video game crash of 1983 and not four employees leaving…
a-dub 4y ago
i 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    it'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 ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pinewurst 4y ago
I’d read that Kassar actually compared the programmers with towel designers, having come from Burlington Industries (a textile company) himself.

readme 4y ago

the irony is that the CEO probably does less work than the assembly line worker

stavros 4y ago
I don't know if it's less work, but certainly the assembly worker definitely delivers more value. Only one of the two killed the company.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  That kind of demonstrates the importance and value of a good CEO though. A couple dumb decisions by an assembly worker won't kill a company. A few bad decisions by a CEO can.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I think most job salaries can be linked directly to how much of a difference the employee can make. A complete dud at McDonalds in the kitchen might cost a few thousand on average but the further you go up, the greater the damage or benefit potential gets.
    - JadeNB 4y ago
      > I think most job salaries can be linked directly to how much of a difference the employee can make. I think that the world's, or at least the US's, teachers are a glaring counterexample.
      - badpun 4y ago
        The problem is that the value that teachers create is hard to compute and hard to capture, so in the end, no one is willing to pay for it.
        specialist 4y ago
        David Graeber, of Bullshit Jobs fame, makes the distinction between service work and caring work. Doing things vs taking care of other humans. Part of his thesis is that society undervalues the labor of caring workers, because they get so much "job satisfaction". Teachers and nurses are examples of caring work. I lean towards Graeber's thesis, mostly because I haven't read any other explanation for this pathology, so Graeber wins by default.
        baud147258 4y ago
        > no one is willing to pay for it parents paying for private schools seem to be willing to pay that for their children
        quesera 4y ago
        Private school teachers are often paid less than public school teachers, and do not have a union or a pension.
        JadeNB 4y ago
        > parents paying for private schools seem to be willing to pay that for their children Exactly—people aren't willing to pay for someone else's education, but everyone needs an education, so teachers who care enough that they are willing to teach for minuscule pay wind up squeezed between societal apathy and societal need.
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > That kind of demonstrates the importance and value of a good CEO though. A couple dumb decisions by an assembly worker won't kill a company. A few bad decisions by a CEO can. A few dumb (or malicious) decisions by an assembly worker can cause enormous damage and incur enormous cost.
  - eloisant 4y ago
    Except the bad CEO still gets a big salary, and a golden parachute when he leaves the sinking ship of the company he killed. And then proceed to get hired as CEO for the next company.
RajT88 4y ago
A 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Schmooze 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 ago
        Schmooze 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".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago
muzani 4y ago
The effects of a CEO is often lagging. If an assembly line worker stops working, you see the results immediately. If a CEO stops working or does something very negative, you might see the effects years later. You'd think that losing key staff would kill the company overnight, but even in this situation, it took 4 years between being doomed and actually dying.

orange_joe 4y ago

what's incredible about this is that Activision remains an industry leader whereas I'm not entirely sure if Atari even still exists.

denkmoon 4y ago
Ironically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Clearly 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 ago
    percentages duh
  - boredtofears 4y ago
    The 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 ago
      The majority of devs don't work on bleeding edge game engine tech, though.
      - boredtofears 4y ago
        Of course, but presumably the top coders at a game shop are involved in whatever inhouse tech they're building.

coffeemug 4y ago

Is there a book on this you can recommend?

vitaflo 4y ago
This is all laid out in the Nov 28, 1983 edition of InfoWorld Magazine.
- chirau 4y ago
  pp. 151-158 https://books.google.com/books?id=sy8EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=sy8EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=fron...

dnissley 4y ago

Interestingly, this is kind of an anti-example of what was asked for in the OP. Here, few people quit, not many.

zomgbbq 4y ago
This 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 ago
OP 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 ago
today they have their scrum masters whisper it in our ears at the daily stand up
- mk89 4y ago
  Ahaha this just made my day :)
- xxs 4y ago
  no scrum mumbo:jumbo in daily meetings; only engineers
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I 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 ago
To 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 ago

Gaming 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 ago
What 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago

I 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.

Mc91 4y ago
> 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 The thing is these two things are linked - one engineer leaving and 30-70% of a team leaving. The quantity of who leaves does not matter as much - a project may be able to handle 70% of consultants, interns, junior and regular programmers leaving, but might die if the 30% (or 25%, or 20%) leaving is entirely senior/staff/principal. One of the lead programmers who has been at the company for many years leaves. He is friendly with some of the other senior programmers and says he thinks the company is slowly going downhill, and he got a new job with better money, and with a saner schedule, work environment and work-life balance. Maybe one of the other senior people leaves for the company he left for. Then other senior people start leaving. It's like Steve Blank's essay about how a company deciding to start charging fifty cents for soda led to an exodus of its best senior programmers. One lead leaving can be a catalyst for others leaving. So they are in a sense irreplaceable. If a company is an oligopoly like Verizon/AT&T or the like, then they are privy to revenue and profits they don't have to compete for, and for companies in that situation people are more replaceable. Not for companies that have to be competitive though.

gabereiser 4y ago

And let’s not forget that the great Woz and Jobs were once Atari employees who left to start a new company called Apple.

scarface74 4y ago

Or it could have been caused by the whole video game crash of 1983 and not four employees leaving…

a-dub 4y ago

i 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 ago
The 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 ago
  it'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 ago

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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pinewurst 4y ago

I’d read that Kassar actually compared the programmers with towel designers, having come from Burlington Industries (a textile company) himself.