President and CEO · Atari, Inc. · b. 1928 · Pre-NES
The textile executive who ran Atari at its commercial peak, dismissed his star programmers as "towel designers" — and thereby created Activision, the first third-party developer, and set the industry on the road to the 1983 crash.
Ray Kassar became president, and later CEO, of Atari from 1978 to 1983, arriving from Burlington Industries, then the largest textile company in the world. He was installed by Warner Communications to bring corporate discipline to a company famously run on countercultural chaos, and he did — Atari's revenues exploded under his leadership. But his tenure is remembered chiefly for a single act of contempt whose consequences reshaped the entire industry. In May 1979, four of Atari's most accomplished programmers — David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead — met Kassar to press their case. Between them they had produced games accounting for roughly 60 percent of Atari's $100 million in cartridge sales the previous year, yet they earned salaries around $22,000 and their names appeared nowhere on the products. They asked to be treated as record labels treated musicians: royalties, and credit on the box. Kassar refused, and did so witheringly. He compared their contributions to those of assembly-line workers, reportedly dismissed them as "towel designers," and asserted that "anybody can do a cartridge." He had already told the San Jose Mercury News in 1979 that Atari's programmers were "high-strung prima donnas" — remarks that earned him the derisive internal nicknames "the sock king" and "the towel czar." The four men walked out and, on 1 October 1979, founded Activision — the world's first third-party video game developer, built explicitly on the principle that the people who made games deserved credit and royalties. Its success proved that games could be published by anyone, which in turn opened the floodgates to the deluge of low-quality software that helped trigger the crash of 1983. Kassar was fired in July 1983 amid Atari's catastrophic losses. His refusal to grant four programmers their names on a box is arguably the most consequential management decision in the history of the medium.