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Atari Inc.: Business is Fun

Curt Vendel,

Marty Goldberg

3.52 · Rating details · 65 ratings · 15 reviews

Atari Inc. - Business is Fun, the book that goes behind the company that was synonymous with the popularization of 'video games.'

Nearly 8 years in the making, Atari Inc. - Business is Fun is comprised of thousands of researched documents, hundreds of interviews, and access to materials never before available.

An amazing 800 pages (including nearly 300 pages of rare, never b ...more

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Paperback, 800 pages

Published November 25th 2012 by Syzygy Press

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Jun 22, 2013 Chad rated it it was ok

Sure, it's self published. But it's also the most poorly written and edited book I've ever read. It was a struggle to finish to book as I reached the end. Every two or three pages had some kind of error or mistake. If that doesn't keep pulling you out of the book, the inconsistent tense (they tried to keep it all in present tense, but fail) and the lack of focus will.

The lack of similar comments from readers and reviewers is shocking. It's like they really didn't read the book or can't see the e ...more

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Aug 27, 2013 Themistocles rated it did not like it

Shelves: computers, history

What a bad, bad book.

To begin with, it didn't catch my eye; cheaply bound, like you could do at any photo copying shop. Well, it's self-published so something like that is to be expected, but for the price it's not good.

Opening it I saw something expected, but not justified; like other self-published books on the retro-computing scene, it's "typeset" in Word. Or something. And it shows. Ugh.

So that's just appearances, one could get over them, but...

The writers absolutely Can. Not. Write. The te What a bad, bad book.

To begin with, it didn't catch my eye; cheaply bound, like you could do at any photo copying shop. Well, it's self-published so something like that is to be expected, but for the price it's not good.

Opening it I saw something expected, but not justified; like other self-published books on the retro-computing scene, it's "typeset" in Word. Or something. And it shows. Ugh.

So that's just appearances, one could get over them, but...

The writers absolutely Can. Not. Write. The text is of a level at par with that of a high school student. A not very good student. To begin with, the text is full of typos. I don't mean a typo here and there, but rather a couple on every single page. Typos, misspellings and grammar mistakes are so often to be found I got bored of cringing. There are sentences that don't even make any sense at all, like the writer started revising it and didn't read it through; or maybe the phone rung and he picked up again without re-reading. What's more, tenses are changed all the time from past to present and future, many a time even within the same sentence.

The whole chapter on Cyan is a mess; just random notes thrown together, 55 pages of them, without the least effort of putting them into something coherent (to be fair, the authors claim this is a 'feature' :D )

So, the book is ugly and the writing is excruciatingly bad and hasn't been edited or proofed even once before going to print. Contrast it with Mechner's The Making of Prince of Persia that I read just after this, written by a 20yo Mechner in the form of a diary and you'll see some sharp contrast... Still, is it worth reading?

Well... let me put it this way: if you don't know anything about Atari, then probably yes. If you've been following the retro scene and have been reading stuff here and there, like I have (and I'm not even a fan of the early Atari), then there's little new to learn. Most of it of little interest - they moved from this building to that one, or personal side stories that are not relevant or specific to Atari and happen everywhere. The authors don't go very deep, and that's probably because they don't know how companies work (a budget meeting "a typical meeting to wrap the year up"? Yeah, only if it wasn't the single most important meeting of the year for a company! Or, "OMG! a rubber mallet in the production line!" - quite a useful and frequently used tool, actually), so they don't know what and how to probe. The fact that they keep making fun of Marketing (with no coverage of its people and results) shows a blind-sighted partiality that verges on stupidity. 25-odd pages on Chuck-E-Cheese? Ehhh....

In short, they totally fail to give a complete image of Atari, even though they plow through 800 pages of text and photos. Timelines are vague, stories not interesting (well, except for the people involved, probably, but even in that regard I've read much better ones) and technical descriptions (even in the chapters with the *sneer* technical warning) are extremely basic. The authors do make an effort to drum up interest in silly ways ("ohhh look now, we're going to tell you something that no one knew before, and it's really funny, lolz"), but always for mundane bits. Their self-important tone ("we know where those cartridges are buried, but we're not going to tell you") is cringe-worthy at best.

Lots of photos. The vast majority of them falls into two categories: stuff you can find online and photos of faces, faces, faces and more faces or buildings. Nice page-fillers! The rest are at times very interesting and never seen before indeed, but are too few and far between. Pagination is also awful, with captions on the wrong page, printed twice or omitted altogether.

It's such a shame that it ends before the company releases the ST series (of which I'm a fan). I'll think twice before buying the two other volumes announced... ...more

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May 12, 2013 jersey9000 rated it it was amazing

I grew up with Atari. One of my earliest memories is playing the original Pong, and when we were kids I also remember all the other kids around coming over to play our 2600. To this day in my storage unit I have a 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar (with Jag CD!) with hundreds of games for them. Needless to say, I am an Atari type of dude, so this book was a wonderful treat for me.

It takes you from the earliest beginnings of Atari, back when it was three dudes and called Syzygy, and ends with th I grew up with Atari. One of my earliest memories is playing the original Pong, and when we were kids I also remember all the other kids around coming over to play our 2600. To this day in my storage unit I have a 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar (with Jag CD!) with hundreds of games for them. Needless to say, I am an Atari type of dude, so this book was a wonderful treat for me.

It takes you from the earliest beginnings of Atari, back when it was three dudes and called Syzygy, and ends with the sale of Atari to the Tramiel family. From start to finish it was w wild ride, for sure. While many of these stories were vaguely familiar to me, there were many, many details I had never heard before. I loved hearing the stories about all the experimentation that was going on. The birth and death of Kermit the robot was great- I had never heard about that before. The thought process behind all the design decisions for the home systems and arcade cabinets was something that I was really interested in. All of these is backed up by a copious amount of pictures, technical documents,internal memos, and wonderful, in depth quotes from most of the players at the time. Hearing from Ted Dabney for the first time was great.

This is a huge book. A book this size, with such a focus on technical issues, would risk losing the audience under a mountain of details, but the crisp writing and great pacing (they frequently jump a bit back and forth in time, with interviews strung throughout) ensures that you never, as a reader, get a chance to feel bored or confused by the tech talk. At around 700 pages (reading it on my kindle, so not exactly sure of the size), with tons of great stories and interviews, by the time I was done I felt like I had lived through the rise and fall of Atari myself. This book is a must have for anyone who is a fan of (or curious about) the roots of video gaming. These are the guys who essentially created an industry, and changed the world. I am glad this story has finally been told in such an objective, thorough way.

When the book ends there is definitely a "wait, then what happened?" feeling, but I have been told that will be part of the next book in the series. I can't wait to read it :) ...more

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Nov 28, 2013 Karl rated it did not like it

I can't in good conscience write a glowing review of this book. In the past decade the computer book field seems to be flooded with these slapadash affairs that are banged together in ten minutes and rushed to press for cash. This book is much along these lines. It is horribly edited. It is doubtful these guys even proofread their writing once. A quick scan would have come up with hundreds of mispellings poorly constructed sentences and bad word usage errors. The book has lots of pictures mostly ...more

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Jul 04, 2015 Irish Rat rated it it was ok

Shelves: owned, atari, video-games, video-game-history, video-game-culture

I made it halfway through this book, which is impressive considering the 3rd grade level grammar going on here. Tenses change partway through sentences almost every other sentence, and whole sentences are ambiguous in meaning because basic grammar hasn't been applied. I wish I could read the rest of it, since there's so much interesting technical information, but alas. ...more

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Jul 05, 2014 Graham Lee rated it it was ok

Shelves: history, software-people

The authors have evidently done a lot of research, but the book is really poorly edited. In addition to typos and other errors there are rapid changes of tense and style, as well as shifts from one time to another that make it hard to follow.

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Jul 14, 2014 Matt rated it did not like it

Lots of good information covered with spelling errors and punctuation errors.

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Oct 23, 2017 Trevor rated it liked it

Given this more stars than many other people who have reviewed it.

Whilst the content of the book was interesting and largely accurate, there are spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes and just downright stupid mistakes (like duplicate sentences) on EVERY SINGLE PAGE.

How a book can go out in this day and age in such condition baffles the mind, it must have been proof read by either Stevie Wonder or Maddie McCann because this book would not have got past anyone who had read it!

A computer spell check ...more

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Sep 07, 2020 Eric Bauman rated it liked it

Shelves: read-in-2020

Had some interesting stories, but seriously needed a proofreader.

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Mar 18, 2014 Roger Asbury rated it liked it

Shelves: computing-history

I am a child of the 70s and 80s. Like many from that time, I spent uncountable hours in front of an Atari 2600, playing the popular games of the time. From Pac-Man and Pitfall, to Combat and oh so many others, I was an addict to them all.

I picked this book up hoping to learn about the company behind my entertainment. On that score, I wasn't really disappointed. The book is packed with history and the stories behind the interesting, if not deeply flawed, personalities that made up the Atari compa ...more

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Apr 04, 2015 Felipe rated it really liked it

I worked for Y! in the late ninties and first few years of the 2000ś i personally enjoyed these book becouse the atmosphere that ran throught atari is the same we breathed in y! at that time.
It helped me understand the basics of silicon valley culture and why some modern companies are still ruled by these beginnings.

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May 15, 2016 Shirley rated it liked it

Shelves: history-american, computing-history, design, technology-history, united-states

Summarizes the conditions under which Atari games were first developed - and launched an industry. Not as tightly edited as some books out there (was self-published), but has historical details not available elsewhere. If you want to understand the roots of today's game industry, is an essential read. ...more

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May 16, 2016 Andrew Wheeler rated it liked it

This is probably the most poorly-edited book I've ever read, but it was still hugely entertaining. There's tons of great history, particularly during the first half of the book. ...more

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