Drawing from deep archival research and extensive interviews, Atari Design is a rich, historical study of how Atari's industrial and graphic designers contributed to the development of the video game machine.
Innovative game design played a key role in the growth of Atari - from
Pong to
Asteroids and beyond - but fun, challenging and exciting game play was not unique to the famous Silicon Valley company. What set it apart from its competitors was innovation in the coin-op machine's cabinet. Atari did not just make games, it designed products for environments.
With "tasteful packaging", Atari exceeded traditional locations like bars, amusement parks and arcades, developing the look and feel of their game cabinets for new locations such as fast food restaurants, department stores, country clubs, university unions, and airports, making game-play a ubiquitous social and cultural experience. By actively shaping the interaction between user and machine, overcoming styling limitations and generating a distinct corporate identity, Atari designed products that impacted the everyday visual and material culture of the late 20th century.
Design was never an afterthought at Atari.
Fallan, Kjetil: - Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of Design History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), the editor of Scandinavian Design (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and co-editor of Made in Italy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He is also co-editor of Bloomsbury's Cultural Histories of Design series and an editor of the Journal of Design History.
Guins, Raiford: - Raiford Guins is a Leeds United supporter. In his day-job he is a Professor & Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School, Adjunct Professor of Informatics, and Director of the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is the author of Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (2009), Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (2014), and Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury, 2020). Guins has also edited several collections and co-edits the MIT Press Game Histories Book Series with Henry Lowood and ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories also with Lowood and Laine Nooney. He is currently writing a small book on Leeds United for Pitch Publishing.
Lees-Maffei, Grace: - Grace Lees-Maffei is Professor of Design History at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is the editor of Iconic Designs (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2014) and Writing Design (Berg, 2011), co-author of Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), and co-editor of Made in Italy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and The Design History Reader (Berg, 2010, second edition forthcoming). She is also co-editor of Bloomsbury's Cultural Histories of Design series.
