[David] Crane found that the cartridges he developed (Outlaw, Canyon Bomber, and Slot Machine) had earned more than $20 million for the company. As he said, “I was one of the people wondering why I was working in complete anonymity for a $20,000 salary.” Others [Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead] began to feel the same: When we looked closely at that memo, we saw that as a group we were responsible for 60 percent of their $100 million in cartridge sales for a single year,” Crane recalled. “With concrete evidence that our contribution to the company was of great value, we went to the president of Atari to ask for a little recognition and fair compensation. Ray Kassar looked us in the eye and said, ‘You are no more important to Atari than the person on the assembly line who puts the cartridges in the box.’ After that it was a pretty easy decision to leave.”
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
O założeniu Activision
