The Secret Life of Vector Generators
By Jed Margolin
Contains some great insight into the early days of sound at Atari, especially this nugget:
At some point, Rick hired Earl Vickers to do sounds and speech development. Up until then, the game programmers were responsible for sounds, which they generally hated doing, so usually the programmers would use Pokey sounds that had already been developed. That’s why, for many years, most of Atari’s games sounded alike. The other game groups decided that having someone just do sounds was a good idea so Earl became the nucleus of a completely separate Sound Group that did sounds for all of the games. Well, almost all of the games. Hard Drivin’/RaceDrivin’ was an exception. I will leave that story for perhaps another time.