34. The Legend of the Atari Burial

Was Atari's E.T. video game the worst of all time? Did it sink the entire video game industry in the early 1980s? Did Atari really bury thousands of copies in a New Mexico desert to cover it up? We dig into the old legend and uncover some answers.

Produced by Sarah Wyman and Dan Bobkoff, with Amy Pedulla and Jennifer Sigl.

Transcript

Note: This transcript may contain errors.

DAN BOBKOFF: There's an old legend about a patch of dirt in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

HOWARD SCOTT WARSHAW: People talk to me a lot about the legend.

DB: They say if you walk out over the sand dunes to a specific spot in the desert and start digging, you'll find treasure.

KRQE: Thousands of copies of one of the epic flops in video gaming history were supposedly laid to rest in New Mexico city's garbage dump.

KOB4: ET for Atari was so bad the company tried to get rid of all the copies. It's rumored truckloads of that game were buried in an Alamogordo landfill back in 1983.

DB: Atari made a video game based on the movie E.T., and the theory goes that the game was so bad… so buggy and unplayable, that the company was left with millions of unwanted copies.

KRQE: Legend has it Atari desperately needed somewhere to dump the extra games and the extra consoles from its El Paso Factory.

DB: But this idea has captured imaginations like Roswell and Area 51.

HSW: I would hear about that here and there and people would ask me what I think about it and I would say, 'I think it's baloney.'

DB: But what happens when someone picks up a shovel and starts to dig?

From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name. Brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.

Today: The legend of the Atari video game burial.

Atari was the hottest game company in the '70s and early '80s. Then it appeared to collapse overnight.

And this is where the mystery begins.

Was it all because of E.T., the game? Did the company really bury millions of copies in a dump? And did one man single handedly tank a whole industry?

We have answers.

Stay with us.

ACT I

DB: To solve the mystery of the lost Atari game cartridges, you have to meet Howard Scott Warshaw.

HSW: The way I put it usually is I'm the most famous person you've never heard of.

DB: Howard arrived in Silicon Valley in 1979, straight out of college. He landed a job at HP. And this is before personal computers were mainstream.

HSW: You know, I'd worked on the ARPANET which later became widely known as the internet. (laughs) And so now I'm not saying I'm Al Gore, I'm just saying I was there.

DB: At HP, Howard and his manager would play computer games to pass the time. Simple games like Yahtzee or car races… very basic '70s stuff... just text on a screen. And when he tired of that, he'd act out.

HSW: I would just do goofy stuff. I would do things in my cubicle or I would take listing markers and make long chains with them and drape them around my cube.

DB: Howard was bored, so he started looking for a place to work that was as interesting as he was. And that's when he heard about life at Atari.

HSW: That was the first time it actually occurred to me that Atari was like a company. It was a place someone could go and work.

DB: Atari started in 1972. It was part of that first wave of Silicon Valley startups. Its first hit was Pong, which was also the first hit video game period.

But unlike other startups, Atari sold out pretty quickly. Warner Communications bought the company in 1976. But after the sale, Atari kept its unique personality.

DB: What'd you heard about the environment before you went there?

HSW: I just heard it was wacky.

DB: Mm-hmm.

HSW: That's all I heard.

DB: Howard landed an interview at Atari. And as soon as they started asking him questions, he knew he was in the right place.

HSW: They were a combination of people drawing out logic diagrams and asking me to analyze and follow through them and explain them to them and there are also people saying, 'Well, how do you react to marijuana smoke if you run into it at work?' (laughs) And so... it was a pretty broad range.

DB: It seems like a very specific person for the job.

HSW: Yeah. I was perfect for it.

DB: And yet, Atari didn't think so—at first. The Atari hiring manager called Howard to let him know he didn't get the job. And, for most people, that would have been the end of it. But Howard is not most people.

HSW: I just said to him, I said, 'Look, I think you'd be making a really big mistake not giving me a chance to come there and show you what's going on.'

DB: Howard wouldn't hang up the phone until the guy offered him a job.

HSW: Finally, he relented and just said, 'Okay, we'll give it a shot.' And like a month later, I started, at the very beginning of '81 I started at Atari. It was this weird orgy of creation and sensation and excitement because the job was to do something brand new. You know usually, you have nerds or you have artists. Now you need a nardist I guess. You need something that's like a hybrid of the two.

DB: Whatever the nardists at Atari were doing… or smoking… it was working. By the early '80s, Atari was king… its Atari 2600 system had about 70% of the market share of home video games. Kids and adults were snatching up games like Pac Man...

[PAC MAN SOUND]

Space Invaders...

[SPACE INVADERS SOUND]

Making these games was intense.

HSW: There were days where you'd come in and you would see people being escorted out. There were days where you'd come in and you would see people literally being carried away to be taken to the psych wards because there were people who lost it—

DB: Wow.

HSW: At Atari. There were multiple nervous breakdowns that happened because there was also a lot of pressure.

DB: But Howard thrived at Atari. He started programming some of the company's '80s hits. And he was innovating! He wrote Yars' Revenge, which he said has the first full screen explosion in video games.

[YARS' REVENGE SOUND]

HSW: Yars' Revenge is in the New York Museum of Modern Art. I'm actually listed as a Museum of Modern Art exhibitor.

DB: After Yars' Revenge, were you a celebrity in the company at this point?

HSW: Um… No, I wouldn't say I was a celebrity in the company, but I was known.

DB: After he finished Yar's Revenge, Howard needed a new project. Meanwhile, Atari had just signed a deal with Steven Spielberg to turn Raiders of the Lost Ark into a game.

HSW: I was selected as a candidate to do Raiders, but if you're going to do Raiders, you don't just do Raiders. What you do is if you're going to do Raiders, if you're a candidate to do Raiders, then you have to go see Spielberg and Spielberg has to approve you.

DB: So he flew down to LA to meet the one and only Steven Spielberg. He waited six hours for his one shot to make a good impression. And, when he met him, Howard could have been deferential. But that's not Howard.

HSW: I told him, 'you know, Steven, I have this theory about how you are actually an alien yourself. Would you like to hear it?' He goes, 'Sure.'

DB: I'm honestly not sure if Howard is joking… if he actually thought Spielberg might be an alien. But in any event this is what he told him in the meeting where Steven had to decide if Howard was the guy to make the Raiders game. That, if aliens came to earth, yaknow, they'd probably send an advance team. To peacefully prepare humans for their arrival.

HSW: I said, 'you know, look at your movies. You're one of the first people who's really done multiple movies about how the aliens are friendly. They're nice people that we meet them and there's no danger and they're nice and we can all get along.' And I said, 'so that's pretty cool.' I said, 'I figured you're like the production arm of this advance team.' I said, 'And your marketing people, they've made sure that these movies have been seen all over the Earth in every language all over the place, it's the perfect way to prepare Earth to meet the aliens.' And I said, 'By the way, kudos to your marketing team, I think they're doing a hell of a job.' I think he was really tickled by this. I think he really enjoyed that. We just said goodbye and that was it and I flew back up to San Jose and then I found out the next day that yup, Howard is going to do Raiders.

[RAIDERS SOUND]

DB: How much time did you spend on Raiders?

HSW: I spent nine months on Raiders.

DB: Because nine months is how long it took to create a good game back then.

Raiders was a big hit. It sold a million copies. And around this time, Spielberg released another blockbuster movie.

E.T.: E.T. Home phone...

HSW: Then on July 27th of 1982, a date that would live in infamy forever, I got a call from Ray Kassar which never happens.

DB: Ray Kassar, the big boss… the head of Atari.

HSW: He comes on, he goes, 'Hey Howard, we need E.T. for September 1st.' This is July 27. 'In exactly five weeks we need E.T.' No one's ever done a game in five weeks. No one's ever really done a game in less than five months. He goes, 'Can you do it?' Then I said to him, 'Absolutely I can. Absolutely. There's no question.'

DB: Coming up, Howard accepts a challenge, and a legend is born. Stay with us.

ACT II

DB: We're back.

Yar's Revenge was a hit. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a hit. Howard was on a high at Atari.

HSW: The amazing drug at Atari was when you could get your game released, go into a store, see people playing your game. The ultimate version of this is when you see kids fighting over the controller to play your game on the demo. That's the ultimate high at Atari.

DB: Howard had had months to perfect Yars' Revenge and Raiders. But getting the deal done for E.T. took a while. It was now into the summer and his bosses wanted E.T. to be done in time for the Christmas shopping season. That meant Howard was only going to have five weeks to design the game, code it, and send it off for production. But Howard wasn't even nervous...

HSW: I needed a challenge. For some reason, I needed to validate, prove, test myself, however you want to put it. I just really needed to do something that I felt was a real mountain to climb.

DB: So, brimming with confidence, he said yes to his boss, Ray Kassar.

HSW: He goes, 'Okay, Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m., there will be a Learjet waiting for you at the San Jose terminal. Be on it and we're gonna go present the design to Spielberg.' So not only do I have to do a game in five weeks, I have to design the entire game in 36 hours (laughs) and be ready to present that design to Steven Spielberg. I just said, 'Cool.' Because I'd never been on a Learjet. I thought that would be really cool.

DB: This time in Spielberg's office, Howard did not accuse him of being a secret alien. He showed him the storyboards he'd thrown together in a day and a half.

HSW: He was looking it over and then he goes, 'So, that's the game?' I go, 'Yeah, what do you think?' He thinks it over and he goes, 'Could you do something more like Pac-Man?' And that just blew my mind. Blew my mind. I wanted to say, 'Gee Steven, couldn't you do something more like The Day the Earth Stood Still?' I was really put off by the idea that one of the most innovative directors wants me to do a knockoff for the game (laughs) for his really solid movie, but I didn't say that because this is Steven Spielberg and it would have been an absurd thing to do. So what I said to him was, 'You know Steven, E.T. is really a breakthrough movie. It's a very… it's a really special movie and I think it needs a special game and it needs something solid and innovative to match what you've done with the game and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing a knockoff of something like that. We want to do something solid and fresh for this.' He was like, 'Okay.' He was very cool with it, I think he just liked Pac-Man was what was going on.

DB: It hadn't been that hard for Howard to adapt Raiders into a video game. It was an action adventure. The suspense and drama translated well as a game plot. But E.T. was different.

HSW: I wanted the game to have some emotional feels and tone. That's how gone I was. That's how crazy I was that I thought I could actually pull this off.

DB: Five weeks. Howard didn't sleep much. He had a workstation installed in his home so he could keep coding. Someone at work had to remind him to eat.

[E.T. SOUND]

HSW: How do you play E.T.? E.T. starts off with a spaceship coming down and dropping you off in the forest.

DB: You're E.T. in the game. E.T.'s friend, Elliott's there too.

HSW: There's Elliott's house, there's the FBI building and there's the science institute because those represent the three humans that are represented in the game. There's Elliott, there's an FBI agent and there's a scientist.

DB: And then, there are… the pits. It's in these pits where you, as E.T., find pieces of a phone. Once you put them all together, E.T. can... phone home.

HSW: And that's how you win the game.

[E.T. SOUND]

E.T. AD: Only from Atari, the video game that lets you help E.T. get home. Just in time for Christmas.

HSW: Oh, when the game comes out, it's a phenomenal success. In December of 1982, it is a good time to be Howard. I have Yars' Revenge is selling well and rolling off the shelves and both Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. are in like the top six or seven of the Billboard top 100 selling video games.

DB: But this was 1982. There was no internet. No reaction videos roasting Atari's E.T. on YouTube. No angry Reddit threads. No Twitter trolls trashing the game. So Howard knew people were buying the game, but he had no idea if any of those players actually liked it.

DB: When did you realize that there was a serious problem with E.T. and how did you feel about that?

HSW: There's some question as to did I ever realize there was a problem with E.T. because you got to understand that for me, E.T. was a tremendous success. Right? I had delivered the product in this ridiculous timeframe, it went out, it was doing well in the charts, it was doing well in sales, it was all good. It wasn't perfect, but it was really good and it was still an achievement.

DB: But in the weeks that followed, something weird started happening. Executives would drop by and walk through the development area...

HSW: Every once in a while, someone would come out to me and they would go, 'You know something Howard? We don't blame you. You really came through for us.' And I'd be thinking, 'Okay, well that's cool.' I had no idea what they were talking about because they wouldn't say E.T. or stuff like this. They would just out to you and go, 'You know, nobody blames you Howard. This is not on you. You really came through. That was cool.' I'm thinking, 'That's nice, but what are they talking about?'

DB: In homes across America, players were unboxing E.T., plopping the cartridge into their Atari 2600s…

[GAME STARTING SOUND]

And then falling into those pits.

[E.T. PITS SOUND]

And getting stuck there.

HSW: The return start going on, the people start saying, 'Oh, this game sucks. It's got a lot of problems. You just keep falling into the pits. Blah-blah-blah.'

DB: Stores were getting tons of returns. All of a sudden things were looking bleak. But it wasn't just because of E.T. The whole video game market was saturated — new companies were getting into games every day, and the games they were producing weren't any good. The industry lost hundreds of millions of dollars in 1983. Thousands of people lost their jobs.

For Atari things went downhill fast. The company lost about half a billion dollars in 1983. It kicked out its CEO, brought in a new one. There were massive layoffs, unsold video games piling up. Atari was essentially over.

HSW: It was just gone.

DB: And there wasn't a sense, because now there's this narrative that E.T. is the game that sank Atari, but no one was talking that way then?

HSW: No. Because Atari had just disappeared. People were more about, 'Oh, video games disappeared.' It was the hula hoop, it was the fad that died. It was the pet rock. And that, that was the story. People weren't focused on why Atari failed. People were focused on the fact that this amazing phenomenon of video games suddenly disappeared. That was the story.

DB: Atari tided itself over by selling its leftover stock of game consoles while it tried to develop a home computer. Howard stuck around until 1984. The company changed hands again, and he took a layoff package.

HSW: So now I'm in a really weird place because now I had found total fulfillment. Professionally, creatively in every way and now it's over. There was never going to be another Atari. That would never be replicated.

DB: Howard was kind of lost after he left Atari. He tried real estate but that wasn't for him. He did a stint working on industrial robots. He wrote a book, did some video production. He tried to move on.

But almost a decade after he left Atari, Howard started hearing about E.T. again.

HSW: In '95, there was a magazine called New Media Magazine and they said 'E.T. was the thing that caused the crash of the video game industry.' And so throughout the rest of the '90s and into the 2000s and stuff, that was the story.

DB: And it was on a new thing called the Internet, in the '90s, that this narrative really took hold.

Some people online became convinced that not only was E.T. the video game the worst of all time… not only did it sink an entire industry… But Atari was so desperate to get rid of the evidence that it had chucked millions of unsold copies of the game into a hole somewhere in New Mexico.

You can still find old message board posts about this from Atari fans. Like there's this one where someone asks: does anyone know the "exact location of the landfill that is filled with millions of ATARI games?"

Another person responds: "wasn't that a hoax?"

Year after year, this idea, this legend, stuck around. It turned into an internet inside joke. A couple of YouTubers even spent eight years making a feature length science fiction parody film about it.

PARODY CLIP: I heard Atari recalled all the cartridges and buried them somewhere in the middle of the desert because the game was so bad...

DB: They crowdfunded $300 grand to make this thing.

But other Atari fans took the legend more seriously. They started doing research, digging through archives, and doing back-of-the-envelope math. And the more they looked into it, the more it seemed like the legend might actually be true. Like tons of E.T. game cartridges might be buried in one specific landfill, in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Coming up: a documentary crew makes the trip to Alamogordo. And they start digging.

Stay with us.

ACT III

DB: We're back.

KRQE: Today, Hollywood film crews dug into an Alamogordo landfill in hopes of uncovering the widely criticized 1982 video game E.T.

KRQE: For video gamers, it is a legendary landfill. A tomb where an entire industry was nearly buried. Now, someone wants to dig them up…

ZAK PENN: I'm Zak Penn. I'm a screenwriter, sometimes director, occasional producer and rarely an actor.

DB: And also an Atari Aficionado.

ZP: Yes. I like Atari a lot. I like a lot of video games.

DB: And it's because Zak Penn likes Atari a lot that he said yes when someone asked him to direct a documentary about E.T. and the fall of Atari.

Unlike those on the internet, Zak wasn't obsessed with the legend.

When Zak was growing up, his friend had a copy of E.T. Zak might have played it once, but it didn't make a big impression on him. But he does remember how Atari was this huge deal and then it wasn't.

ZP: Atari literally disappeared in a way that is almost unfathomable. It would be like if Apple went out of business, you know in six months and next year people are like, 'oh, what's that an iMac? That's cute.'

DB: So, in 2014, after he signed on to direct the documentary, Zak Penn showed up at a town dump with an excavation team and a lot of expensive digging equipment.

KOB4: Well today there was a massive dig at that landfill as video crews filmed to find the truth once and for all.

ZP: Well, my initial expectations were that this wasn't going to take long, that how hard could it be to dig up a bunch of stuff that you know, it's probably a good chance… We won't find it because you know, I mean, it's always hard to find things buried in the ground.

DB: ...and on the off chance that there was anything buried in the ground, well, that would be amazing. Zak really liked the ridiculousness of this situation. It had a quality he looked for in his films:

ZP: 'Oh my God, what if we find out the secret' but it's also like...very hilariously banal.

DB: And he figured, if his team dug up the landfill and didn't find anything, they'd at least have some solid material for a mockumentary. But either way, Zak wasn't taking the legend of the Atari burial super seriously.

ZP: What really changed everything was going to interview Howard Warshaw and that's and that's when I started to realize wait. I might actually have something else on my hands here and I maybe don't need to worry as much about the meta version of all this.

HSW: I gave him many, many hours of material. And then I found out that his specialty is doing mockumentaries. And I love mockumentaries, but I never wanted to be the star of one. I thought, 'Holy crap. With all the material that I gave him, if he really wanted to do a hatchet job or a mockumentary on me, he could do a legendary job on me.' (laughs)

ZP: When I saw Howard Warsaw and how serious it was to him, you know, the irony dropped away. It was no longer, you know, I was just being genuine. There's nothing ironic anymore. Now it was actually we were all really invested in we want to find these games. We want the story to have, you know to come to some sort of conclusion.

DB: So, how do you actually go searching for buried trash?

For Zak, it meant getting in touch with a garbage collector named Joe Lewandowski. Joe claimed he actually saw the burial happen back in 1983. And he'd spent years trying to triangulate the exact position of the cartridges. This is Zak and Joe in a scene from the documentary, "Atari: Game Over."

ZP: So this is the famous landfill. The burial—the final resting ground of E.T.

JL: This is the place, this road here, this gate, this is exactly the way the Ataris would have came through.

ZP: So this whole area, this is where it's buried?

JL: Some people don't believe it's there, but trust me. It's there.

DB: So all that was left... was to dig.

On the first morning of the dig, hundreds of Atari fans showed up to watch.

MOVIE: We've been here for a while already. It's tedious. The wind's horrible. We wonder if they're going to find anything or not.

ZP: First of all getting out there as you can imagine a landfill does not smell good. In fact, most people described it as the most uniquely bad smell they'd ever experienced. It's, there's something unnatural about it. It does smell a little bit like garbage, but it's like garbage from space or something. I don't know how to describe it... like a burning tire mixed with garbage mixed with moon rocks or something. And you could not get it off you. Like you... I had to launder my sneakers like five times just to get them... and put them in a plastic bag.

KRQE: The search for what many call the worst Atari game ever at a New Mexico dump is still in full-swing tonight.

DB: Howard Scott Warshaw made the trip from California to see this. He was nervous…. seeing his past literally dug up.

DB: What was it like being there?

HSW: It was, it was intense. It was very intense to be there. It was surprising how it kind of snuck up on me.

DB: But he was still skeptical they'd find anything.

HSW: I've never been so anxious to be wrong in my life because I never really believed this stuff was there, but I realized that movie would be much worse if this stuff wasn't there. (laughs)

ZP: As you can imagine with 500 people out there now and everybody waiting to see. It got really tense and then a sandstorm came in which was insane like from the White Sands blew in.

MOVIE: Alright, now the wind is really picking up, on cue!

On cue.

HSW: It was just a sandstorm. There was literally a sandstorm. This huge horrible sandstorm. It was brutal.

DB: For hours, they dug and dug, dozens of feet underground. Through dirt, then layers of concrete, they pulled up bits of trash. Nothing from Atari.

MOVIE: Trash bags, stroh's beer cans, wood, tons of wood… We're right about where we need to be, but there's still no Atari detritus at all.

ZP: There was definitely a worry that we were not finding the games. Joe was very confident, and I don't really show this in the movie, but we're all feeling pretty confident that we knew where the games were based on, you know, the... what he had done so far, but then he started to worry that maybe he was digging in the wrong direction.

DB: It was the third day of the dig. In the afternoon. The archaeologists called Joe and Zak Penn over to the excavation site. They showed them something in a bucket.

ZP: They came over and like 'you got to come see, you gotta come look' and there was you know, the first E.T. cartridge that we found.

MOVIE: Can everybody hear me? We found something. Uh, the archaeologists have confirmed it's from 1983. 28 feet down. It's E.T. the video game. Intact. In its box. [applause]

DB: Howard's in the crowd, taking this all in.

HSW: Then when they found it, it was a very emotional moment for me. It started coming up in buckets, in claw fulls.

DB: There were piles overflowing with crushed cardboard boxes, but the E.T. cartridges inside looked like new. Atari fans recorded videos on their phones and took selfies. They lined up to shake Howard's hand...

HSW: And in that moment I realized that this thing that I did over 30 years ago, this little 8K of computer code that I wrote was still ... There were hundreds and hundreds of people braving a sandstorm to be in this place for this event. I realized, 'I did something that created this event. That led to this experience that over 30 years later, this product that I did is still creating interest and interaction and excitement for people.'

The greatest success that I had with E.T. probably was that moment. The idea that I could still feel like I had launched something that was generating this kind of entertainment and excitement for a whole bunch of people.

DB: So it was true. In a way. Atari really did bury stuff in a New Mexico dump. But after Howard and Zak and the crowd took stock, they realized it didn't quite live up to the myth.

First of all, Atari buried all sorts of stuff there, not just E.T. There was computer equipment. Other games. As it turns out, only 10% of what they found were old E.T. cartridges.

But all this raised another question. Why were they buried here in the first place?

ZP: And basically what it came down to was...burying them was cheaper than destroying them. Like weirdly it cost a lot more to actually incinerate the games than it did to bury them. And they usually buried them in Texas. And that's where they were all stored in some warehouse and the problem was that there were looters. And they found this place in New Mexico that was cheaper. And that was really the deciding factor is 'what's the cheapest place to bury them that we also have some protection from looters?'

DB: So the real reason the games were entombed in Alamogordo was less exciting than the legend. But even though Zak and his team didn't unearth a gigantic conspiracy, this moment was still important. It started to rewrite the whole narrative about Atari and E.T. and Howard.

ZP: I think for Howard Warshaw the fact that there was all these people out there to get his autograph. You know, this is a guy who had left the business and there's all these people who were like huge fans of his so for him, the fact that this had turned into this weird celebration of him and his work, you could imagine I mean, it was pretty overwhelming for him. And I think also if you ever stand around in a horrible smelly place for eight hours (laughs) hoping to find something. I mean you could be looking for a spoon and you'd be excited when it came out of the ground.

DB: I wanted to know: why were so many so many so fascinated by this legend? It was, after all, literally a failing company's trash.

ZP: The second something becomes buried there's something deep in our minds that says 'it's a secret. It's treasure we need to find the answer.'

DB: And now this failure of a game...was treasure. After the dig, people wanted to buy the E.T. game. So the city of Alamogordo sold the unearthed cartridges — there were nearly 1,000 of them. One sold for $1500 alone. The city pocketed more than $60,000 from the sale.

DB: Did you feel vindicated?

HSW: I did feel vindicated. There's a number of things that I had cried about with E.T. Some of them were happy, but (laughs) it's brought me enough tension over the years, but it's also brought me some real insight and satisfaction.

DB: And, Howard's moving on from E.T. He finally landed on a new career...

HSW: Well, I'm the Silicon Valley therapist.

DB: That's right. After bouncing from job to job, industry to industry, Howard realized his experience with E.T. wasn't actually unique. Lots of people in Silicon Valley experience spectacular success and phenomenal failures… all the time.

HWS: And I'm a very good person for them to talk to. When I left Atari, there was that dream of finding a place that I would be happy with and satisfied with again. That's what I needed to do. I didn't know how I would do it or where I would do it and it started like a 20-year journey, to try and find gratification and as I became a therapist at each step along the way, what I realized was this was it. This is the first time in almost three decades since leaving Atari that I actually found work that was as... not only as fulfilling and satisfying as Atari was, it actually exceeds that. I got there. It only took like almost 30 years.

DB: Howard Scott Warshaw. You can see the dig for yourself in Zak Penn's film, Atari: Game Over.

CREDITS

DB: Let us know what you think of the show. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Send us an email to householdname@insider.com. Follow me on Twitter @danbobkoff or join the interesting conversations in our Facebook group.

This episode was produced by Sarah Wyman and me with Amy Pedulla and Jennifer Sigl.

Special thanks to Hannah Wall, Jonaki Mehta, Andrew Stelzer, and Kew Media International.

Sound design and original music by Casey Holford and John DeLore.

Our editor is Gianna Palmer.

The executive producers are Chris Bannon and me.

Household Name is a production of Insider Audio.