Retro Gamer interviews the men behind Atari's famous arcs

The Atari logo: an upside down peeled banana or an alphabetic representation of a game of Pong? Designed by George Opperman in the Seventies, the Atari motif would become as well loved with mini adults as the McDonald’s arches and the abrasive capital M used for the advent of music television. The wood-grain Atari 2600 would go on to sell over 30 million units and more than 100 million game cartridges in its lifetime. Retro Gamer tracked down David Crane, Warren Robinett, Owen Rubin, and Steve Wright - men that formed the very arc of Atari gaming - for an exclusive interview.

What are your fondest memories of the days when the Atari 2600 ruled all?

Steve Wright: The CES shows. Atari had a huge booth at the CES show and I was always asked to do ‘booth duty’. People and the press would come by and get all excited about the new games. I would demonstrate the games and reveal stories about game development.

Owen Rubin: Well, those of us in the coin-op side, where many of the original game ideas for the 2600 came from, found it aggravating at best that our ideas were used to make 2600 products. We were never credited for the creation, or allowed to partake of the very large bonus pools 2600 designers made on porting our games.

David Crane: Programming for the 2600 was one of the toughest technical challenges ever in the history of consumer electronics, so that should make it an unpleasant memory, right? I have always loved a good puzzle, and you can say the same thing about a puzzle: “Why involve yourself in an endeavour where the solution is hidden and hard to find?” The answer is, “Because it is fun!”

Warren Robinett: It was pretty satisfying to get the idea for doing an adventure game – rooms, objects, and monsters – which existed only as a text adventure game at that time, as a videogame, and then figure out how to do it. Many late nights and long hours – and then – in spite of significant obstacles and naysayers have it turn into a big success.

What has been your greatest ever Atari 2600 triumph and why?

Steve Wright: The rapid prototyping game development system. I noticed that it would take anywhere from nine to twelve months to program a new 2600 game, then it would be tested and often found not to be any good and shelved. I proposed that we develop a system that would allow us to get a game up and running in a few weeks. Then we could test it, and if it was found to be good, release it for programming. In about nine months the system was up and running – a Symbolics 3600 computer with a high bandwidth connection to an Ikonas frame buffer. The Ikonas had very fast graphics processing power which simulated the graphics chip in the 2600. The Symbolics computer used Lisp, an object-oriented programming language that was ideal for writing the game logic. Together, they formed a $200,000 one ton Atari 2600. We actually used the system to create the videogame animation for the movie Superman III in addition to some game designs.

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