ANTIC Interview 438 - John Carlsen - Atari Summer Employee

Hello, and welcome to this interview-only episode of ANTIC, The Atari 8-bit computer podcast.  I’m Randy Kindig, your host for this episode.

John Carlsen worked at Atari only briefly, as a summer job for 6 weeks in 1987, between his final years of high school. Later, in 1988-1989, he worked for its founding president, Nolan Bushnell when he signed on to Nolan’s latest startup, called Bots, Inc.  They made pizza delivery robots (and a related customer-facing order entry system) for Little Caesars Pizza. John then worked for Axlon, which was created by former Atari employees to manufacture add-on products for the Atari computer, followed by Aapps Corp., which spun out of Nolan's offices.  In 1990-1991, John also worked for Mediagenic (Activision, Infocom, etc.) until a week after its hostile takeover.

This interview took place on March 6, 2024.

Links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell