From: dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: I am NOT making this up, OK?  (was Re: Closed ... <ho hum>)
Date: 19 Dec 1992 20:21:38 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.ai.mit.edu

In article <1992Dec17.193935.4591@news2.cis.umn.edu> davidli@simvax.labmed.umn.edu writes:
>In article <1gnve3INNhd9@life.ai.mit.edu>, dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>>It's just *amazing* to me how you can twist everything around so that
>>it's not Atari's fault.  We met with the group that was the Falcon
>>games development group.  Many of them happened to have been Lynx
>>programmers.  Any cluelessness on their part with respect to the Atari
>>computers was certainly beyond our control.
>
>Exactly.  Now, if you had quoted my ENTIRE posting, then the part you pulled
>out of context would have made a bit more sense.  Someone else has already
>posted with a clearer reading than your own of my intent.  I would suggest that
>you are acting under the false assumption that I am either personally attacking
>you or acting as a 'cheerleader' for Atari.

I'm not sure of what you're faulting me for here; I expressed amazement
that after reading the gory details of the visit you place the blame on us
instead of Atari (this is what I've written above), but the whole rest of
this message outlines our blunders, and details how it's our fault that
GW didn't impesss Atari, didn't make it to market, etc.  Which is it?

>By the way -- you could have sent me e-mail with the names or phone numbers of
>the folks you quoted in a previous article, rather than boring the network with
>useless "non-commercial policy" statements.  

Why should I be your personal secretary?  I have 1500 mail messages in
my inbox from Septmber 1st and later.  The only reason I said anything
at all was to assuage any fears that I was lying about the prices.

>If *I* had a general meeting with Atari staff, and were treated in the manner
>with which you feel you were treated, I would have walked out after the first
>quip from a Tramiel about 'lawsuits'.  Nothing further would have been (and,
>from your postings, was) gained by further discussion.

What would that possibly have gained?  Would we have made the cost of the
trip back?  Would we have had a better chance of making a successful
deal with them after storming out of the meeting?  

We were entirely professional the whole time.  Once we realized that we
had no hope of striking some deal with Atari, that was our only goal --
to retain our dignity and professionalism.  Even when the people we met
with refused to talk to us (even to just say goodbye) and had to relay
messages through Bill Rehbock, we tried to keep things in perspective.
(It was difficult.)

>[As far as the brouhaha over the Syquest cartridge drive ... either you should
>have set up the machine yourself or put something into that blank "C" partition
>so that normal people would find something in that partition upon bootup... I
>don't know many people who would think to look for a SECOND partition on a
>cartridge drive when the first (and apparently only) partition is blank. 
>Corporate types are NOT generally computer whizzes.  They're not paid to do
>hardware...]

When you come to a meeting on someone else's turf, they run the show
when it comes to stuff like that.  I can assure you that Leonard wasn't
the one setting up the hardware; it was a techie type.  We weren't
given the option of setting things up ourselves, if I recall
correctly.  Anyway, I had no reason to suspect that they'd bungle such
a simple task since we told them ahead of time to expect us to bring a
cart drive.

>The people with whom you (the software house, Double-Click, is 'you' in this
>context) should have been talking are not associated with Atari Corporation. 
>You should have been talking with the high-end compiler companies and with the
>Atari-oriented game companies.

How do you know we haven't done that?  I didn't say anything about our
dealings with companies other than Atari.  Atari invited us to come out
and show us GW.  We didn't ask them.  They weren't going to pay our way,
but why would we refuse when they were talking about the possibility
of bundling GW with the Falcon?

>Quite frankly, you should have hired a couple of experienced technical writers
>and got the damn thing out shortly after the release of the snowball fight game
>-- I personally know several programmers who would still be writing for the
>Atari ST if GW had come out a year ago.  ('You' is, again, the software house.)
>If Double-Click couldn't do it, another software house should have been sought
>immediately.

We had a contract with DC.  Generally speaking, you can't sign on with
a company and then go looking for someone else.  What happened in the
end is unfortunate.  But it was entirely out of our hands once the
contract was signed.  This is the way freelance software works.

>So, some bad business choices were made by the folks at DC.  The
>libraries were written well before the Falcon ever came out, and could
>have been on the market in 1991, not in 1992.  The success of the
>libraries would have given you a bit more leverage in incorporating
>Falcon technologies into them (upgrade time!).

Had you been involved, you would understand the restrictions we had
to work with.

>I don't know what in hell Atari LYNX programmers were doing at a meeting to
>show off a game library system suitable for the Atari ST/Falcon line.  You
>should have asked to talk with someone who actually knows something about the
>ST computer, rather than people who use Amigas to program hand-held game
>machines.

You have a very warped understanding of what Atari HQ is like these
days.  The WERE no employees at Atari that knew anything about writing
games for the Atari computers.  (This is a fact, not an exaggeration.)
There isn't an "ST games group" or anything like that.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
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