Is it possible to run a company that way now, when it takes years and millions of dollars to make a game?
I think it would be hard. At the same time, I believe you can either treat employees as equals, as adults, in which you treat everybody with equal dignity. Or you can have a monarchy, where there are the executives and there are the serfs. Monarchies work, but in today's world, where people are highly educated, highly capable and highly mobile, I think treating them like adults is a better way.
You started out at a time when good ideas and hard work were all you needed. How has entrepreneurship changed since then?
I think it's still the same. I think the next Apple or the next Atari will be started within the next few months, we just won't know it for five years.
The venture capital process hasn't mucked everything up with focus groups and strategic planning?
In some ways the VC process has hurt things. I feel that in some ways, it's perhaps a blessing that Atari could not raise capital from third parties, so we had to do it by tricks and gimmicks. We didn't raise any venture capital until we were $40m in sales.
The venture capitalists are clearly a catalyst to making things happen faster... but I think it does represent a break from some of the creative business structures that were started. For instance, you can trace the casual dress code back to Atari. And it came from the premise that we don't care how you look, we don't care when you come to work — as long as the work gets done. It's part of treating people like adults.
You were right about video games, right about high-tech pizza parlors. What about personal robots? Were you just ahead of the curve there?
The personal robot, to me, was a defeat — and it was a defeat based on unintended consequences. We had a PC at the core, and in those days, noise immunity on a computer was very, very low. What we could not solve was that robots running across any surface would generate static electricity. When the static electricity was discharged, sometimes just across the bearings of the wheels, that was enough to reset the computer. We tried all kinds of isolation approaches.
With a computer, [if] you get the blue screen of death, you reboot, you go forward. In a robot environment, if you have a computer failure, all your sensors go out, all your fail-safe stuff. So the robot can be locked into a mode where it's going full-speed into a wall. We used to laughingly call that the "mow the baby" mode. It was a thing where we never felt the robot was ready for the marketplace.
With a computer, [if] you get the blue screen of death, you reboot, you go forward. In a robot environment, if you have a computer failure, all your sensors go out, all your fail-safe stuff. So the robot can be locked into a mode where it's going full-speed into a wall. We used to laughingly call that the "mow the baby" mode. It was a thing where we never felt the robot was ready for the marketplace. I'm a little confused on what the plan is for uWink.
Seems like you've got your finger in a lot of pies, from arcade games to mobile phones.Within [a few] weeks, all will be made clear. We'll have a major announcement soon. Think of all these little pieces of technology that we have in our product lines, aiming toward a direction in which I had to develop certain pieces of technology, and I thought I'd monetise it on the way, but they were never the end goal.
So an autonomous, video game playing, coin-op pizza parlour robot?
*Chuckling* You forgot navigation systems.
Any regrets, like letting Steve Jobs quit, or selling Atari too cheap?
You can spend your life doing 'woulda, shoulda, coulda'. I wish I hadn't sold to Warner, because I think that the world would be a very different place with Atari being the pre-eminent video game company today. It really bothers me that Sony and Nintendo and all those guys harvested the business that should have been rightly ours. The centre of gravity moved east, and it should rightly have been here.
