PART 3 OF 5
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Jack Tramiel was just ten years old when the Nazis marched into Poland in 1939. He and his Jewish family were soon shunted to the Lodz ghetto, west of the capital, Warsaw, and finally to the horror of Auschwitz concentration camp. But in a stroke of fate, Jack and his father were selected to work in a labour camp in Ahlem in northern Germany. His parents didn’t survive the Holocaust, but Jack was rescued by the U.S. armed forces in early-1945. During the decades to follow, this survivor would deliver the world’s most popular home computer, the Commodore 64.
The Reckoning
It still ranks as one of the biggest movies of all-time. However, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial also spawned the game seen as a tipping point for one of the most disrupted periods in computer gaming history.
By 1982, the global home tech market was having a sugar-high fuelled by games. Atari had great success with its Atari 2600 gaming console, but as home computers offered a myriad of software options, consoles were now fighting home computers for new sales.
Movie game tie-ins were becoming important pop-culture moments and the success of at the box-office ensured the interest of game-tech companies. Atari won the license to create an game and turned over the project to successful lead game developer
