Video Game Book Club -- Once Upon Atari by Howard Scott Warshaw
17This is about Howard’s life before, during, and after he worked at Atari. There are some really great stories in here and I like how he set this up. He starts telling two stories which merge in the last few chapters. It begins with him at the garbage dump in New Mexico where the documentary Atari: Game Over is being filmed. This is the site where Atari dumped the contents of a warehouse they were closing. The book also flashes back to Howard growing up. He does this throughout the book telling a bit about digging up the land fill then flashing back to other parts of his life.
He reflects on the Yar’s Revenge and E.T. the most to compare the development times of the two games. He’s trying to explain the differences between a normal development time of 6 to 9 months to the five weeks he had for E.T. I had a lot of questions going into this book and thankfully Howard answers the ones he was capable of answering. He even tells us what he might have been able to do if he was given more time.
Howard talks a lot about the disconnect between the corporate, marketing, and engineering departments at Atari. The corporate and marketing sides didn’t understand what it took to make what they were selling, but I was left with the question of if they wanted to or if the engineers wanted to explain it to them. I feel like some tried and that led to the two brain drains at Atari which resulted in Activision and Imagic being created.
This is a really great book!
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