Dennis Koble was an early Atari employee, where we would
become manager of the computer and consumer divisions. He designed
Atari's "Touch Me" handheld electronic game. He also wrote three
programs that were published by Atari Program Exchange: Avalanche,
an adaption of the coin-op game which he also created; and the text
adventure games Chinese Puzzle and Sultan's Palace.
He was at Atari for about 4 1/2 years before leaving to
co-found the video game publisher Imagic. There, he was perhaps
best known for creating "Atlantis" for the Atari 2600 (which we
don't actually talk about in this interview.)
"We had to show our best stuff. And we wanted to show
technological tricks that we figured the Activision guys hadn't
seen before. I don't know if they felt that rivalry toward us at
that point, but it became a rivalry a little later, it really
did."