On the first version of consumer Pong: "We took it to the toy show, and guess what? We sold none. Zero. One of the most successful consumer products of the time, and we sold none.... Innovation is hard. People don't realize that the channels aren't there, people don't understand what it is. I always like to say that everyone believes in innovation until they see it."
On managing Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Atari in the 1970s: "About at this time two guys worked for me called Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Jobs was a very, very bright young man, but a little bit abrasive -- nobody has heard that before. I always felt to run a good company you had to have room for everybody -- you could always figure out a way to make room for smart people. So, we decided to have a night shift in engineering -- he was the only one in it." (Audience laughs)
"And he and Wozniak for Atari actually designed a game called Breakout, which was a game that I blocked out, but I needed to get an engineer to work on it. But at the time we had gotten all corporate ... and we let the engineers bid on it, they bid on projects they wanted to do. And at that time, all of the paddle games were considered passe, so nobody wanted it. So, I got Wozniak to do it, and it turned out that Breakout was the game that launched Nintendo. They unmercifully copied it, released it in Japan... But oh well, that's another story." (See video below).
On missing the boat on what became the game Simon: "(Atari's) Touch Me to this day is a giant irritation. Why? We did it as a coin operated game. It did OK, but it wasn't a big win... What Touch Me really was what you all would call Simon, which makes me grit my teeth because the guy who saw it, actually patented it after seeing it and sold it to Hasbro... So, I got nothing for Touch Me, or Simon. Anyway, it is one of those things, but it still really bugs me. I just can't let it go."
On the Atari 2600 game console release: "The idea here was, let's give people a choice. Let's sell some razor blades. Cartridges we could build for about $3, and we could sell them at retail for about $20. That's a nice a margin. But it was basically obsolete on the day that we shipped it because it had 128 bytes of RAM. 128 bytes. That's not kilobytes, bytes. And why? RAM was very expensive then. And from the time we started the design from the time we actually launched it, the cost of RAM had come down.... The 2600 was really a crappy game system. If you look at it, you know we didn't make the ball square because we thought it was cool. It's because all we could do."
