Four Atari programmers demanded their names on the box and invented the publishing industry

In the spring of 1979 an internal memo circulated at Atari breaking down sales by cartridge. It showed that of the company's thirty-five programmers, four had made the games responsible for around sixty per cent of sales. Those four — David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan — drew a fixed salary, received no royalties and appeared nowhere: not on the box, not in the manual, not in the advertising.

In May they went to Atari's chief executive Ray Kassar with a proposal modelled on the record business: the author takes a percentage of the run and gets his name on the sleeve, like a musician. Kassar refused, and his phrasing circulated through the industry in several versions: a programmer is no more important than the worker assembling cartridges on the line, and people like you are a dime a dozen.

A company built on credits

On 1 October 1979 the four departures, together with Jim Levy, a manager from the music business, incorporated Activision — the world's first independent publisher of games for someone else's platform.

The model was copied wholesale from the record industry. The author's name was printed on the box. The manual gave the programmer a full page with a photograph and an account of how the game came about. Royalties were calculated on the run. Separately there were Activision Patches: send in a photograph of your high score on the screen and receive an embroidered badge for that game. Those are, in effect, the industry's first achievements, nineteen years before anyone invented them again.

Atari sued in 1980: trade secrets, patents, former employees. The case ended in a 1982 settlement — Activision began paying Atari a royalty, and with that, third-party publishing became a legal, documented practice.

The 1982 settlement is the document by which the industry permitted itself to have publishers.

The other side of the win

Then came the part nobody ordered. If third-party publishing is lawful, anyone can become a publisher — and anyone did. By 1982 dozens of companies were shipping Atari 2600 games, including the food conglomerate Quaker Oats. Shelves filled with cartridges no buyer could tell apart, retail could not sell what it had bought, and in 1983 the market folded.

Nintendo's answer in 1985 was a direct response to that precedent: the 10NES lockout chip inside the console, a licensing agreement capping how many games a publisher could ship a year, and cartridge manufacturing done only in-house. The platform took back the right to decide who publishes.

Crane himself wrote Pitfall! in 1982, a game that sold more than four million copies and held the top of the charts for the better part of a year. His name was on the box.

Every present-day argument about storefront commissions, about a platform's right to reject a game, about who owns the audience, is a continuation of that meeting in May 1979. The percentages have changed. The question has not: who is the author here, and on what basis is he paid.