Why was “Eastern Front” released through the Atari Program Exchange instead of the official Atari label?
Because the Atari marketing people thought that a wargame would never sell. Was it your idea to sell the source code? That flew in the face of the heavy corporate secrecy of the time. Yes, and since I owned the source code, it was my decision to make. Funny thing, though: even publishing the source code didn’t do the trick. Lotsa people still had problems with the programming problems and nobody ever came up with anything as good as “Eastern Front (1941)” on the Atari. Did the “Eastern Front” source code kit sell well? The “Eastern Front” source code was the most expensive item in the APX catalog; I think it sold for $150. All I can remember about its sales figures is that they greatly exceeded our expectations. We concluded that a lot of people wanted to know how it was done. What was the mood at Atari in the year prior to the big layoffs? Did you see it coming? Nobody foresaw the collapse coming, not even me, and I was the Cassandra of the company. I still remember a manager’s dinner
