That's actually surprising. While the early game industry was young and there wasn't much management skill or experience, it still strikes me as an unusually odd error. It wasn't just a subjective difference of opinion over what style of game would be more popular or something similarly unknowable. There was objective data available, they had a smart, trusted insider study it extensively and the actual issue was easy for even a non-technical person to understand.
Rubin's analysis was likely a big reason Atari was late to the laserdisc game craze... They were so late that their first (and only) laserdisc game Firefox shipped at the very moment the laserdisc craze was imploding.
The phenomenal success of Dragon's Lair forced Atari to rethink their position about the technology -- Everyone in the industry was jumping onto the laserdisc bandwagon at that point, not wanting to be left behind on the Next Big Thing. So the execs at Atari figured maybe Rubin was wrong in his analysis, and therefore Atari needed to quickly catch up.
Obviously, in hindsight, Rubin's analysis was spot on. But you can't blame the execs for jumping in - at the time it looked like laserdisc was the future of the industry.
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That's actually surprising. While the early game industry was young and there wasn't much management skill or experience, it still strikes me as an unusually odd error. It wasn't just a subjective difference of opinion over what style of game would be more popular or something similarly unknowable. There was objective data available, they had a smart, trusted insider study it extensively and the actual issue was easy for even a non-technical person to understand.
Rubin's analysis was likely a big reason Atari was late to the laserdisc game craze... They were so late that their first (and only) laserdisc game Firefox shipped at the very moment the laserdisc craze was imploding.
The phenomenal success of Dragon's Lair forced Atari to rethink their position about the technology -- Everyone in the industry was jumping onto the laserdisc bandwagon at that point, not wanting to be left behind on the Next Big Thing. So the execs at Atari figured maybe Rubin was wrong in his analysis, and therefore Atari needed to quickly catch up.
Obviously, in hindsight, Rubin's analysis was spot on. But you can't blame the execs for jumping in - at the time it looked like laserdisc was the future of the industry.