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When I was super young, I had an Atari and used to play 'Space Invaders.' Then I fell in love with 'Mario Bros.,' 'Sonic the Hedgehog' and 'Yoshi' on Super Nintendo. I was quite a bit of a gamer as a kid when I think about it.
I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture.
I am not a gamer. Not since the days of Atari.
Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.
And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.
Selling Atari when I did - I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years.
I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going.
I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.
When I was running Atari, violence against humanoid figures was not allowed. We'd let you shoot at a tank... but we drew the line at shooting at people, with blood splattering everywhere.
When I was a kid, I had an Atari 2600, and I would play Pac Man, Frogger, all that kind of stuff. And I did enjoy going to the arcade.
