Name: Raymond E. Kassar
Born: January 2, 1928
Death:

Occupation/Title:
President CEO Atari Inc. 1978 - 1983

Bio Summary and family life:
Information not available.

Education and Training:
All that is listed as Kassar’s education is that he went to Brown University and studied business management.

Career Outline:
Ray Kassar was formerly the president of Burlington Industries, which was a textile company. He was hired in February of 1978 as the president of Atari. In November of 1978, he became CEO when Atari co founder Nolan Bushnell left the company over a fight between Warner Communications, Atari’s parent company over the future of Atari. He built Atari into a video game giant that it was known to be, before he was forced to resign do to allegations of insider trading in 1983. He sold all of his shares in Atari just hours before a report was published that Atari had suffered monetary loses in the millions.

Impact on Gaming:
Ray Kassar’s impact on video games is pretty evident. He is know to be the “ Creator “ of the video game maker Activision. While Kassar was at Atari he was able to anger a large amount of the game developers to the point where they walked out of Atari and started their own company and called it Activision. He angered the developers by not crediting them in any way. He told them that they were no more important to the games then the people that worked on the assembly line, so they “walked” out.

Personality:
Ray Kassar was known by the employees at Atari to be an extremely flamboyant homosexual out side the work place. Employees could have cared less what his personal life was like, but they say he made a daily habit of being chauffeured to work in a limo and then would proceed to make grand entrances into the office.

Anecdotes:
Other than being charged and fired from Atari while being the CEO, Ray Kassar is the name sake for the widely popular game “ Yar’s Revenge.” The creator of the game was a former employee at Atari named Howard Scott Warshaw. “Yar” is Ray spelled backwards. The title is a deliberate jab at Kassar, mocking his dictator like work ethic as well as his flamboyancy.

Information on Ray Kassar other than that listed above is hard to find. Through my research I found that many websites and data bases have the exact same information listed, almost word for word. I would very much like to keep researching Kassar and update this information as I find it.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kassar
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Ray_Kassar
http://www.spock.com/Ray-Kassar

Contributors To This Listing: Aaron Moore