Can liberty be destroyed by the truth?

I'd love to design a school.

I was actually the manager of the games department of an amusement park when I was at college, so I understood the coin-op side of the games business very well.

Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. We had some of the most sophisticated sound-creating systems, and were instrumental in MIDI.

I don't think people understand how much hard work innovation is. That it's not just getting an idea. You really have to cross your T's and dot your I's long before you ever start on the project. I don't think people perceive that about me. I work hard.

Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work.

Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don't get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new.