Sul penultimo numero (127) della rivista inglese Retro Gamer c'è un'interessantissima intervista di 6 pagine a Ronald G. Wayne, dipendente Atari dal 1973 e fondatore di Apple insieme a Stephen G. Wozniak and Steven P. Jobs.
Ci sono aneddoti inediti riguardanti Bertolino, l'allora distributore italiano degli arcade Atari, che non devono assolutamente andare perduti e che riporto.
La Fratelli Bertolino snc di Torino è conosciuta anche per aver vinto una causa contro Sidam, che realizzava bootleg dei videogiochi arcade Atari.
http://www.tilt.it/deb/sentenza-it.html
You spent some time in Europe too, didn't you?
Atari made me international field service engineer and I spent several months in Europe, including about six weeks in Britain visiting people who were aspiring to be distributors of Atari products. My job was to make sure they had facilities where they could service the circuit boards and so on. If I qualified them then they could go ahead and buy the product, and they became the distributor for that town or segment of city.
[…]
Was it a culture shock to be working in Europe?
When I got to Italy, we noticed they had a terrible coin shortage there [in the Seventies, demand was outstripping the small coinage minted by the Italian government. We met Monsieur Bertolino who was the main Italian distributor and he was using these special tokens that were being struck. He'd go to a place and he'd buy these tokens to play the games. If you had tokens left over you sold them back, and some of these were gaming machines where you got back more. I qualified him virtually immediately.
Cause for celebration?
Sure. He said 'Right, we'll go out to lunch. Now that we're qualified we'll have a big celebratory lunch’. So we went to this restaurant back in the hills someplace. It was about 150 years old. I think the staff were the same age. We're sitting around the table and Bertolino was discussing the military games he wanted: at least six Battleships and ten Anti-Aircraft and at least 12 Tanks. We said the Tanks were cornmitted to Belgrade. Then I looked around the room while this rather loud conversation was on and began to worry we were going to get arrested. We soon changed the subject.
Ci sono aneddoti inediti riguardanti Bertolino, l'allora distributore italiano degli arcade Atari, che non devono assolutamente andare perduti e che riporto.
La Fratelli Bertolino snc di Torino è conosciuta anche per aver vinto una causa contro Sidam, che realizzava bootleg dei videogiochi arcade Atari.
http://www.tilt.it/deb/sentenza-it.html
You spent some time in Europe too, didn't you?
Atari made me international field service engineer and I spent several months in Europe, including about six weeks in Britain visiting people who were aspiring to be distributors of Atari products. My job was to make sure they had facilities where they could service the circuit boards and so on. If I qualified them then they could go ahead and buy the product, and they became the distributor for that town or segment of city.
[…]
Was it a culture shock to be working in Europe?
When I got to Italy, we noticed they had a terrible coin shortage there [in the Seventies, demand was outstripping the small coinage minted by the Italian government. We met Monsieur Bertolino who was the main Italian distributor and he was using these special tokens that were being struck. He'd go to a place and he'd buy these tokens to play the games. If you had tokens left over you sold them back, and some of these were gaming machines where you got back more. I qualified him virtually immediately.
Cause for celebration?
Sure. He said 'Right, we'll go out to lunch. Now that we're qualified we'll have a big celebratory lunch’. So we went to this restaurant back in the hills someplace. It was about 150 years old. I think the staff were the same age. We're sitting around the table and Bertolino was discussing the military games he wanted: at least six Battleships and ten Anti-Aircraft and at least 12 Tanks. We said the Tanks were cornmitted to Belgrade. Then I looked around the room while this rather loud conversation was on and began to worry we were going to get arrested. We soon changed the subject.
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