“They totally screwed it up. When I heard some of the announcements and the analysis of it, I’m shaking my head and saying, ‘What in the hell were they thinking?’ Of course that wasn’t going to go down well.

Citing piracy concerns as a reason for Microsoft’s now scared DRM policy, Bushnell stated that, “They want to sell Office as a service. They want it all to be in the Cloud, they want to rent you stuff, not sell you. And when you look at some of the things about systems and procedures, they really don’t like software as an object because it’s too easy to get it ripped off.

“In the back of their mind they look at a billion Chinese people, and they sell less software there than a small town in Texas.”

Of course, Microsoft has now reversed its stance on the DRM and Don Mattrick has departed to head up Zynga as its new CEO. So it all (sort of) worked out. Right?

Speaking to VG247, Bushnell stated that,”Atari has been really abused by a succession of shareholders who were really just interested in the royalty streams associated with the IP, but not really interested in the game business,” he told VG247. He added those shareholders had lost sight of making innovative or interesting content.

“It was just a case of them paying themselves large salaries and nursing the brand. I mean the brand took in $10 million in royalties every year just from t-shirts and sheets and peripherals and stuff like that, because the logo was strong. That didn’t mean the company had anything, it was just historical with no attempt to bring it into today.”