章 31: Atari Corporate Meeting 1971
On January 20th, 1971, a few days after his 19th birthday, Simon held a management meeting at the Atari headquarters on Staten Island.
The eight founding members were present, as well as Gunpei Yokoi and some important management positions. Simon didn't really know most of those people in depth, but had a overall understanding of most of them.
"I want to use this meeting today as a conclusion to last year and a general description of the goal Atari will have in this year and in the coming years.
Only if you learn from the past and have a clear view of what you want to achieve in the future, can we together lead Atari on a path to even greater success.
I believe that after the last year everyone in this room can really feel the deep potential of Atari and the Gaming Market.
Let's first conclude the financial results of last year."
Everyone, including Dennis and Tanja were already full of expectations for this announcement.
Of course, Simon was not deliberately hiding the financial statements from his two biggest helpers in the company, but the real conclusion and definite results were only known for a few days, after both his families' financial consultants and Deloitte checked them rigorously.
"During 6 months in 1970 Atari managed to achieve pure profits of roughly 135 million US Dollars. This already includes all the investments Atari made into his production equipment and roughly 20 million US Dollars that I personally used to invest in Red Bull.
I plan to cash out an additional 20 million US Dollars and use 5 million US Dollars to reward all the employees of Atari.
The plan for the distribution of this bonus will be made up by Dennis and Tanja. I am sure they will make sure everybody receives his just part of this bonus."
After this first announcement everybody in the room was extremely excited. The management team was crazy with joy that they reached such high positions of such a profitable company just one year after graduating, while the game developers were genuinely happy that their games were beloved by the world. Of course, they knew that Simon was always very generous to the technical department of Atari, which meant they would receive a large part of this bonus.
When the applause faded Simon continued with a happy smile on his face.
"Of the remaining 110 million US dollars I plan to use 60 million, over 50%, in order to further upgrade our production capacity and invest in technical research of different gaming consoles and technical reserves for the future. Further details will be discussed with leader Gunpei Yokoi and Steve Wozniak.
The remaining money will be invested into more tangible assets, but how exactly this will happen needs to be discussed in future meetings. Right now, I do have some ideas, but they are not quite ready to be announced."
Surely Simon already talked with Dennis and Tanja about some of his future plans. He wanted both companies, Atari and Red Bull, to invest in the Entertainment Industry. For both he wanted to start with the sports industry. While the target he chose for his sister and Red Bull was the Chicago Bulls, the future legendary basketball team of Chicago, he wanted Atari to get involved with the Entertainment industry of Los Angeles and the West Coast.
Buying the Los Angeles Lakers now and creating the Showtime Lakers Era himself would be the perfect entry into the Entertainment Industry of the West Coast and make further acquisitions in the future way easier.
Simon himself knew very well that even if Atari would generate many profits in the coming years and he could even use bank loans to acquire targets, buying companies like Disney or Paramount without having connections in the Entertainment Industry would just be financial suicide.
The perfect example would be Sony, which used the acquisition of Columbia in the future to invade the American entertainment industry. Even though Simon himself was a true American, the closed entertainment circle of the West Coast, especially the Jewish faction, would still see him as an outsider if he just bought himself in with money.
Buying the Los Angeles Lakers and building their reputation alongside the National Basketball Association (NBA), which will be led by a Jewish businessman, David Stern, in the future will heavily improve his chances to be accepted by this circle.
The rest of the corporate meeting was relatively uneventful. When the meeting finished Simon had in depth talks with Woz and Gunpei Yokoi first. He explained them some of the research he expected them to do in the next few years. Firstly of course to improve the arcade machine, which will be their main product in at least the next 5 years and to start technological research into gaming consoles like the first Famicon Nintendo would invent in the next decade.
For Woz himself Simon prepared the game plan for the next twelve months. This included one of the most influential games of all time, Space Invaders.
Space Invaders would be developed in 1978 and is a shoot 'em up arcade video game developed and released by Taito in Japan, and licensed to Midway Manufacturing for overseas distribution. Commonly considered as one of the most influential video games of all time, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser cannon to earn as many points as possible.
Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games ever made, having ushered in the golden age of arcade video games. It was the inspiration for numerous video games and game designers across different genres, and has been ported and re-released in various forms.
While creating this legendary game Woz' other main job was to hire and educate further technical personal. Simon's main goal was to increase the size of the game developers to support creating 2-3 arcade games simultaneously. For 1971 Simon was fine with just creating Space Invaders and spreading Snake and Tetris all over the world. The current production capacity, even with further investing money into it and increasing the capacity to more than 30000 arcades per month, would simply not be able to support more games currently. His goal for 1972 would certainly become more ambitious.
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