HOWIE RUBIN
When Howie Rubin joined Atari in 1974, he had already accrued over five years’ experience in the arcade business. He had worked for Betson Enterprises, a major distributor of coin-op machines, from jukeboxes and pinball tables to Pong and Tank, and had seen the emerging world of videogames first-hand. He took what he learned to his role as sales manager at Atari, watching the company rise to its pinnacle in the early Eighties. He would go on to set up the videogame division at Gottlieb and enjoyed big hits with Q*bert and MACH 3, before moving into the consumer market as president of Jaleco USA. “I’ve worked on lots of good games and lots of failures,” he chuckles. “I love to BS about the good old times and strongly believe the best is yet to come.”
Howie, you will have heard the sad news that Tim Skelly passed away earlier this year. Weren’t you the man who brought him to Gottlieb?
I was, though not as an employee – as a consultant. I hired him to do one game but also to teach the others. In the beginning, there were no schools and no rules. People didn’t know how to do stuff, especially the software guys. Everything was done in assembler so they had to write the tools as well as the game.
Did you feel like a manager putting together a rock band and by recruiting a famous lead singer, it would be easier to attract a bass player and drummer?
[Laughs] I don’t think I thought of it like that. We needed to get started and the fastest way to do that was hire someone who had done it all already, someone who could both create and teach… and credit to Tim, he did help coach [the others].
Tim insisted on having his name displayed on the screen of his first game for Gottlieb, Reactor, the first incidence of this in a coin-op game. Was it hard to
