Ray Kassar
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Raymond E. Kassar (born January 2, 1928) was president, and later CEO, of Atari from 1978 to 1983. He had previously been vice-president of Burlington Industries, a textile company.
Ray Kassar was hired in February 1978 as president of Atari's consumer division by Warner Communications, who at the time owned Atari. By this time, rifts had begun to develop between the original Atari staff (most of whom had engineering backgrounds) and the new hires brought in by Warner (who, like Kassar, mostly had business backgrounds).
In November of 1978, when Atari founder Nolan Bushnell left the company after a dispute with Warner over the future of Atari, Kassar became CEO. Under his leadership, sweeping changes were made at Atari and the laid-back atmosphere that had existed under Bushnell's leadership all but disappeared. Kassar's twenty-five years at Burlington Industries had given him a taste for order, organization, and efficiency and his efforts to revamp Atari along similar lines provoked substantial animosity. Kassar shifted the focus away from game development and more toward marketing and sales. Atari began to promote games all year around instead of just at the Christmas season. R&D also suffered deep cuts and the discipline and security at Atari became strict. Kassar became unaffectionately known to many at Atari as the "sock king" and the "towel czar" (due to his previous years in the textile industry) after he once referred to Atari programmers as "high-strung prima donnas" in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News in 1979.
During the Kassar years, Atari's sales grew from $75 million in 1977 to over $2.2 billion just three years later. Though Atari enjoyed some of its greatest success during this period, the stifling atmosphere and lack of royalties or recognition to the individual game designers angered employees, many of whom quit. Several of these former Atari employees would go on to form Activision. During this period, nearly all members of the original Atari staff, including Al Alcorn, quit or were fired. Atari's upper management also suffered severe turnover rates. Many blamed Ray Kassar's autocratic management style, but Kassar was not held accountable.
In 1981, the highly popular and successful game Yars' Revenge was released for the Atari 2600. Howard Scott Warshaw, the game's designer, got the names "Yar" and "Razak" by jokingly spelling "Ray Kassar" backwards.
In 1982, Kassar donated a sum of money to Brown University, his alma mater. In recognition, the university named a university building the "Edward W. Kassar House". The Kassar House is currently home to the university's mathematics department.
Contrary to popular belief, Kassar was not responsible for deal to make the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game off of the blockbuster movie. Steve Ross, CEO of Atari's parent company Warner Communications, was the one who was in talks with Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures. [1][2] Kassar's response to Ross' query of how he liked the idea of making an E.T. based video game was, "I think it's a dumb idea. We've never really made an action game out of a movie."[2] Ultimately though, the decision was not Kassar's to make and it went through, and it was reported that Atari had paid US$20–25 million for the rights—an abnormally high figure for video game licencing at the time. The game was not only poorly received and sold poorly, but demand had been widely overestimated.
In July of 1983, Kassar was forced to resign from Atari over mounting allegations of illegal insider trading activity. In December of 1982, Kassar had sold 5,000 shares of stock in Warner Communications only hours before a much lower than expected fourth quarter earnings report would cause Warner stock to drop nearly 40% in value in the following days. The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Kassar and then Atari vice-president Dennis Groth of trading stock with illegal insider knowledge. Kassar settled, returning his profits without acknowledging guilt or innocence. The shares that Kassar sold actually constituted only a small amount of his total holdings in the company, and the SEC later cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Upon Ray Kassar's resignation, James J. Morgan, formerly of Philip Morris, replaced him as CEO of Atari in September of 1983. Since that time, Kassar has focused on investments and other hobbies. He is now retired.
From December 2, 2000 until February 11, 2001 a series of photographs culled from Kassar's personal collection were on display at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The exhibition, entitled "Painterly Photographs: The Raymond E. Kassar Collection", presented 33 works made for exhibition from 1900 to 1910, featuring some of the most important camera artists of the time, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Heinrich Kuehn, George Seeley and Clarence H. White.
[edit] References
- The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon--The story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, by Steven L. Kent (2001) ISBN 0-7615-3643-4
- High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, by Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson (2003) ISBN 0-07-223172-6
