Ray Kassar

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Ray Kassar (born January 2, 1928 in Brooklyn , New York - † December 10, 2017 in Vero Beach , Florida ), full name Raymond Edward Kassar , was an American manager . He was, among other various positions at Burlington Industries and finally as president and CEO of Atari, Inc. operates. There he was responsible for the economic rise of the US game manufacturer between 1978 and 1981, before he had to leave the company in 1983 at the beginning of the emerging video game crash .

Career

Pre-Atari

Kassar studied business management at Brown University . He donated a large sum to his alma mater in 1982, for which they renamed a building as "Edward W. Kassar House", which today houses the Mathematics Institute. Kassar has worked as Executive Vice-President for the textile manufacturer Burlington Industries and President of the Burlington House division. As a member of the board of directors , Kassar stayed with Burlington for over 30 years.

Although he had no knowledge of computer games, Ray Kassar was recruited by Warner Communications in February 1978 as a consultant for their then subsidiary Atari and company founder and CEO Nolan Bushnell was appointed to the side. Warner was dissatisfied with his daughter's sales development. Sales of the Atari 2600 home console had started satisfactorily in 1977, but Atari was unable to deliver enough at Christmas due to production problems and also had sales problems with its Pong home console and the arcade machine business, resulting in a loss of $ 25 million. With the help of the marketing expert Kassar, Warner's Vice-President Manny Gerard Atari wanted to put Atari back on the road to success or, in case of doubt, if Kassar saw no other options, he would wind it up. From this point on, the differences in mentality between the businessmen of the parent company, who mostly came from the east coast, and the engineers and programmers of the Californian games company became more and more apparent. Bushnell greeted Kassar, who had arrived in a suit and tie, on his first day in a T-shirt with the imprint "I love to fuck". Looking back, Kassar was shocked by what he said was the completely haphazard and unstructured way of working of the company. The company had neither marketing nor sales , but consisted almost exclusively of research and development . Nevertheless, Kassar saw sufficient potential in the Atari 2600 to continue the company and began developing a marketing plan.

Managing Director of Atari, Inc.

In November 1978 Nolan Bushnell left the company after heated arguments with Gerard about the future direction of Atari. Among other things, Bushnell had called for the Atari 2600 to be abandoned in favor of a new, technically more powerful console. Reluctantly, Kassar now took over management of the company as CEO and President. The company organization was significantly changed under his leadership. In his 25 years at Burlington Industries, Kassar had developed a taste for order, organization and efficiency. He abolished the Friday parties, introduced a dress code, increased security controls (security doors, guards) and introduced core working hours . His efforts to modernize Atari according to these standards met with great resentment and distrust within the workforce. Kassar was referred to by his employees as the "sock king" (sock king) and the "towel czar" (towel tsar) because of his background. Kassar had again in 1979 in an interview for the daily newspaper San Jose Mercury News his programmers as " high-strung prima donnas " (German: "neurotic prima donnas ") refers. Kassar pursued the sober economic approach that Atari first had to sell the already existing, stacked goods before it could bring new goods to the market. Therefore, he increased the focus on marketing and sales, which meant that the actual game development took a back seat and the research department had to accept deep cuts. Atari began promoting its games year-round instead of mostly during the Christmas season as before. Kassar also recognized that the success of the Atari 2600 game console depended on the quality of the games published. Therefore, he arranged for Atari to license successful arcade titles such as Space Invaders in addition to his own developments and ported them for his home console.

Despite the strained relationship between workforce and management, Atari was able to increase its sales under Kassar's leadership after three years from originally 75 million dollars to over 2.2 billion US dollars. In 1982 Atari contributed roughly half of Warner's total sales and two-thirds to operating profit. The changed corporate culture, including dissatisfaction with non-existent bonus payments and a lack of recognition, also led to numerous departures of leading employees. Almost all employees of the first few hours, including Pong inventor Al Alcorn , left the company or were laid off. There was also high fluctuation in senior management. Many employees named Kassar's leadership style, which was described as autocratic , as the main cause .

Decline of Atari

The departure of programmers David Crane , Larry Kaplan , Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead proved to be decisive . They felt they were not sufficiently rewarded for their work as game designers, whose products made the company several million dollars. They therefore demanded a small commission for success from Kassar, which Kassar refused. David Crane quoted Kassar as saying “ You are no more important to that game than the guy on the assembly line who puts it together ” (German: “You are not more important for this game than the guy on the assembly line who did the whole thing at the end screwed together "). After leaving Atari, the four developers founded Activision in October 1979 , the first third-party publisher for computer games to produce games for Atari's own Atari 2600 console , thereby breaking Atari's dominant position. In 1981 Atari released the hit game Yars' Revenge . For the names "Yar" and "Razak", game designer Howard Scott Warshaw used a slightly changed backwards spelling of "Ray Kassar". Warshaw later referred to the game as "Ray's Revenge on Activision".

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't Kassar who was responsible for the contract to develop the game ET the Extra-Terrestrial . It came about on the initiative of Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications, who negotiated with director Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures, mainly with the aim of keeping Spielberg in control of its own film studios. When Ross asked Kassar what he thought of the idea of ​​a computer game based on the film ET - The Extra-Terrestrial , the latter replied “ I think it's a dumb idea. We've never really made an action game out of a movie ”(German:“ I think that's a stupid idea. We've never really made an action game out of a movie . ”). But Kassar's concerns were ignored. Due to the long negotiations, the game had to be completed by the Christmas business of 1982/83 under enormous time pressure. Since none of the programmers wanted to take over the project voluntarily, Kassar called Howard Scott Warshaw personally and asked him to develop the game. The game, for whose rights Warner paid an astronomical sum of 20 to 25 million US dollars, turned out to be a veritable flop. The company was able to sell just 1.5 million of the five million units of the game produced, and part of the overproduction was finally buried along with other leftover stocks in the New Mexico desert (see Atari Video Game Burial ).

In July 1983, on charges of insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Warner forced Kassar to resign from his position with Atari. In December 1982, 23 minutes before Warner announced Atari's sales figures were significantly lower than expected, Kassar had sold 5,000 of his shares in Warner Communications. After the numbers were released, Warner shares fell nearly 40% in the coming days. The SEC accused Kassar and Ataris then Vice-President Dennis Groth of trading stocks with illegal insider knowledge. Kassar settled the dispute by repaying the resulting profit, without, however, associating an admission of guilt. In fact, the package sold was only part of his shares in Warner. The SEC later acquitted him of any wrongdoing. Kassar's successor at Atari was James J. Morgan in September 1983 , previously working for the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris .

Later activities

Later Kassar appeared mainly as a collector and private investor, as well as a board member of the American Hospital of Paris . From December 2, 2000 to February 2011, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art exhibited a series of photographs taken from Kassar's private collection. The exhibition, entitled Painterly Photographs: The Raymond E. Kassar Collection , showed 33 works that were created for various exhibitions between 1900 and 1910, including pictures by some of the most important photographic artists of the time, such as Alfred Stieglitz , Edward Steichen , Heinrich Kühn , George Seeley and Clarence Hudson White .

literature

  • Curt Vendel, Marty Goldberg: Atari Inc .: Business Is Fun . Syzygy Press, Carmel, NY 2012, ISBN 978-0-9855974-0-5 .
  • Steven L. Kent: The Ultimate History of Video Games . Three Rivers Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-7615-3643-4 .
  • Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson: High Score !: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games . Osborne / McGraw-Hill, Emeryville, California 2002, ISBN 0-07-223172-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary , accessed December 20, 2017
  2. ↑ Info about the Kassar House
  3. ^ A b c d e Steve Fulton: Atari: The Golden Years - A History, 1978–1981 ( English ) In: Gamasutra . UBM, plc . August 21, 2008. Retrieved June 8, 2014.
  4. ↑ a b Tristan Donovan: The Replay Interviews: Ray Kassar ( English ) In: Gamasutra . UBM, plc . April 29, 2011. Retrieved June 8, 2014.
  5. ↑ Tom Sito: Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation . MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2013, ISBN 978-0-262-01909-5 , pp. 111 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  6. ↑ Complete quote: “You come from a textiles background, how do you get along with engineers considering you have no experience in engineering?” - "I get along with them just fine, I'm used to working with high-strung prima donnas." Curt Vendel, Marty Goldberg: Atari Inc .: Business Is Fun . Syzygy Press, Carmel, NY 2012, ISBN 978-0-9855974-0-5 , pp. 388 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ↑ 25 Smartest Moments in Gaming: Atari Brings Space Invaders Home ( English ) Archived from the original on February 4, 2012. Retrieved on June 8, 2014.
  8. ↑ The Game Turns Serious at Atari ( English ) In: The New York Times . December 19, 1982. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  9. ↑ a b Kenneth B. Noble: 2 Charged In Atari Stock Sale ( English ) In: The New York Times . September 27, 1983. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  10. ↑ a b Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , p. 238
  11. ↑ Editor: What the hell happened? . In: Imagine Media (ed.): Next Generation Magazine . No. 40, April 1998, p. 41.
  12. ↑ a b Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games , p. 237.
  13. ↑ Phipps Keith: Interview — Howard Scott Warshaw . AV Club. February 2, 2005. Retrieved December 10, 2009.
  14. ↑ Levi Buchanan: IGN: Top 10 Best-Selling Atari 2600 Games ( English ) In: IGN . August 26, 2008. Archived from the original on July 26, 2011. Retrieved on September 10, 2011.
  15. ^ Painterly Photographs: The Raymond E. Kassar Collection
personal data
SURNAME Kassar, Ray
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kassar, Raymond Edward (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American manager
DATE OF BIRTH January 2, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 2017
Place of death Vero Beach , Florida