Ray Kassar

Raymond Edward Kassar (born January 2, 1928) was president, and later CEO, of Atari Inc. from 1978 to 1983. He had previously been executive vice-president of Burlington Industries, the world's largest textile company at the time, and president of its Burlington House division. A member of the Board of Directors, Kassar had spent over thirty years at Burlington.

Ray Kassar was hired in February 1978 as president of Atari Inc.'s consumer division by Warner Communications, who at the time owned Atari. By this time, rifts had begun to develop between the original Atari Inc. staff (most of whom had engineering backgrounds) and the new hires brought in by Warner (who, like Kassar, mostly had business backgrounds).

In November 1978, when Atari Inc. co-founder Nolan Bushnell left the company after a dispute with Warner over the future of Atari Inc., Kassar became CEO. Under his leadership, sweeping changes were made at Atari and the laid-back atmosphere that had existed under Bushnell's leadership all but disappeared. Kassar's twenty-five years at Burlington Industries had given him a taste for order, organization, and efficiency and his efforts to revamp Atari along similar lines provoked substantial animosity. Kassar shifted the focus away from game development and more toward marketing and sales. Atari Inc. began to promote games all year around instead of just at the Christmas season. R&D also suffered deep cuts and the discipline and security at Atari Inc. became strict. Kassar became unaffectionately known to many at Atari Inc. as the "sock king" and the "towel czar" (due to his previous years in the textile industry) after he once referred to Atari programmers as "high-strung prima donnas" in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News in 1979.

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