Atari Recruits

Once upon a time, working in the videogame industry was still a newfangled thing.  There were no video game development classes, or widely-used tools, and certainly no well-defined qualifications.

And even the mighty Atari had to run ads in general circulation videogame magazines, seeking people to augment its pool of talented in-house personnel:

These old ads always fill me with bittersweet nostalgia.

How cool it would have been if I had been six or seven years older, graduating from college with a brand-spanking-new Computer Science degree in hand when this ad appeared.

How exciting it might have been to pack up my stuff and head west to work for the legendary Atari, even if I had to code for the Atari home computers instead of the console or coin-op platforms of my dreams.

How sad, no doubt, to witness the industry crashing around us all a few years later.

It all came and went so fast.