ATARI Failure: The Success Of Atari, A Gaming Success Story
ATARI Failure
Purpose
What happens when a company focusses only on performance, profit and increasing their share price and neglects the health of the business in terms of the people it employs?
A change in leadership and organisational focus resulted in Atari, a gaming success story, becoming a tragic failure.
Unpacking what the health of an organisation consists of and how the leadership affects this will speak to our problem definition in terms of preventing leadership failures.
Game on
Atari was founded in 1972 by an engineering graduate from the University of Utah, Nolan Bushnell, and shot to fame and wealth with much loved games like “pong” that was based on the ever popular game of ping pong.
Bushnell worked at a pinball arcade to pay …show more content…
history. By 1980 their annual sales had grown to more than $2 Billion. The success however was not to last. Bushnell had already left the company due to a power struggle with Warner communication in 1978, and some of Atari’s best engineers and developers had followed suit. While Atari was making millions of dollars, Warner paid the programmers less than $30,000 a year, they did not share in the profits the games generated, and were not even allowed to see any sales figures. Basically the programmers did not receive any public credit for their …show more content…
Under his reign Atari achieved its greatest success, but also its greatest failure. Kassar’s outlook that they stop focussing on being technically innovative and just get the games licenced and out there proved not be a recipe for success, but rather failure. This approach put a lot of stress on the developers and created an environment full of negativity and even led to an increased number of nervous breakdowns amongst the engineers. In the race to get games on the shelves, it seemed he had completely lost sight of the health of his company and also the quality of his products. This combination proved to be lethal to Atari’s future as a success story.
E.T. is sent packing
In essence, quality and team-work was suffering in Atari’s bid to produce at an ever faster rate. This was evident when they brought the very popular arcade game “Pac-man” into the video gaming consol. The poor gaming capabilities and visuals drove down sales expectations and led to huge losses.
E.T that was based on the Steven Spielberg hit movie, was an even worse failure with Atari customers, and of the few cartridges that were sold, most were returned by disappointed gamers. In an unorthodox move, Atari ended up dumping millions of Pac-Man and E.T. game cartridges into a New Mexico landfill and having them crushed by steamrollers before burying them under tons of cement. This would not have been necessary if
Purpose
What happens when a company focusses only on performance, profit and increasing their share price and neglects the health of the business in terms of the people it employs?
A change in leadership and organisational focus resulted in Atari, a gaming success story, becoming a tragic failure.
Unpacking what the health of an organisation consists of and how the leadership affects this will speak to our problem definition in terms of preventing leadership failures.
Game on
Atari was founded in 1972 by an engineering graduate from the University of Utah, Nolan Bushnell, and shot to fame and wealth with much loved games like “pong” that was based on the ever popular game of ping pong.
Bushnell worked at a pinball arcade to pay …show more content…
history. By 1980 their annual sales had grown to more than $2 Billion. The success however was not to last. Bushnell had already left the company due to a power struggle with Warner communication in 1978, and some of Atari’s best engineers and developers had followed suit. While Atari was making millions of dollars, Warner paid the programmers less than $30,000 a year, they did not share in the profits the games generated, and were not even allowed to see any sales figures. Basically the programmers did not receive any public credit for their …show more content…
Under his reign Atari achieved its greatest success, but also its greatest failure. Kassar’s outlook that they stop focussing on being technically innovative and just get the games licenced and out there proved not be a recipe for success, but rather failure. This approach put a lot of stress on the developers and created an environment full of negativity and even led to an increased number of nervous breakdowns amongst the engineers. In the race to get games on the shelves, it seemed he had completely lost sight of the health of his company and also the quality of his products. This combination proved to be lethal to Atari’s future as a success story.
E.T. is sent packing
In essence, quality and team-work was suffering in Atari’s bid to produce at an ever faster rate. This was evident when they brought the very popular arcade game “Pac-man” into the video gaming consol. The poor gaming capabilities and visuals drove down sales expectations and led to huge losses.
E.T that was based on the Steven Spielberg hit movie, was an even worse failure with Atari customers, and of the few cartridges that were sold, most were returned by disappointed gamers. In an unorthodox move, Atari ended up dumping millions of Pac-Man and E.T. game cartridges into a New Mexico landfill and having them crushed by steamrollers before burying them under tons of cement. This would not have been necessary if