Joe Decuir

The rise and fall of Commodore computers in the 70s and 80s as described by the people who created the companies and technologies.

Before Google, Yahoo and even Apple, before the Silicon Valley cliché of informal dress code, skateboards running the corridors and wild creativity became commonplace, one company embodied the digital economy lifestyle and business style: the one firm coming out of the Age of Aquarius was Atari. The story of Atari is two-thirds the story of Nolan Bushnell, founder and visionary, and one-third the first and probably biggest boom and bust of the new economy some 20 years before the new economy even existed. Atari was showing that technology is cool, way before the personal computer revolution took place and they were reaching out to an ever-growing audience with something that is still cool today: video games. Atari literally introduced the digital world to the mass consciousness.

How Atari helped create the games industry years before it should have happened, and the lucky deals and unfortunate mistakes that almost destroyed the entire industry just as quickly as it was born. The personalities of the pioneers, the creations of the engineers, and the challenges, technology and business deals. See the games and hear the stories from the creators themselves.

Over the course of August 1997, interviews were shot for a video documentary entitled Stella at 20: An Atari 2600 Retrospective. The founders of Atari, the original engineers, the famous programmers, and some lesser known programmers were gathered together to look back on the system that launched the home videogame industry. Volume 1 contains a roundtable discussion on the origin of the 2600 itself, from concept to finished product, as well as musings on the rise and fall of Atari and changes in the industry then vs. now.