28 Red Bull Campaign (2)

After Caroline understood the full content of the planned marketing campaign she immediately left Simon alone in his apartment and made her way to the production facility and current headquarters of Atari. She couldn't wait to convince Dennis and Tanja to run the marketing of their products together.

Of course her brother could have just ordered them to follow her wishes, but he clearly explained that he was heavily relying on his management team in Atari to carry on the daily business and future organization of the company.

He didn't want to just overrule their will and creativity just because he could. He already determined everything related to technological research and game development. This is something Simon had to do in order to lead Atari on a path of quick success. But he didn't want to create a company that was solely reliant on his decision making in order to survive.

His goal was to create an independent management team and even create different game development teams in order to create hit games without his contribution in the future. Maybe even some wonderful games could be created that were never available in his previous life.

Caroline was very impressed with the vision of her little brother and found herself in roughly the same position as Dennis and Tanja at Atari. After giving the initial idea for Red Bull and helping with some creative advice Simon never bothered to intervene in any of her decision making. Of course she was sometimes annoyed that SImon didn't participate more and let her do the majority of the work, but overall she was more than happy to take over full responsibility.

It took her a couple of days to get the full approval of the management team of Atari to couple their brand new game to her energy drink, whose potential was not quite known. Her major argument relied on Simon, because she knew that even though he was not managing the company all day, the whole management deeply respected him a lot and his creative ideas and forward looking values proved to be true again and again.

In the end Dennis and Tanja agreed on the deal, but with many conditions. One of them having Atari as a future shareholder of Red Bull. The management asked for the right to invest once Red Bull starts their first large financing. Caroline agreed, but in turn asked for an investment position for Red Bull, once Atari will go public in the future. This kind of cross-shareholding should further bind the interest of both companies in the future.

Over the next few days Simon spent his time on Gunpei Yokoi and explained to him the current organizational structure of Atari and presented to him the current headquarters. The management team was very curious about the young Japanese executive their boss personally recruited. Flying over across the planet and using many incentives and promises in order to let this unknown person join their company was really unexpected for all of them.

When they learned that Gunpei was responsible for the hardware development of their company in the future and that he would not be heavily involved in either business management nor finance they all calmed down a little. The only person he could really rival in their company was their technical director Steve Wozniak. But Woz was extremely pleased that Simon invited somebody that could share his pressure.

"Simon thank god you finally invited somebody to help me manage the production base. I personally like to work more on computers. Programming and designing is my strength. Having to work on the hardware of the arcade machine was already stretching my limits. I would certainly not be able to develop a gaming machine with higher specifications.

Luckily you found a real talent this time. My conversations with Gunpei were extremely enlightening for me. Having him be in charge of the production base and the future hardware development really frees up my tense spirit. I would rather work on the next game after taking a short break. Finishing Tetris was really a lot of work, because the algorithm was a lot harder to design than Snake. Finally everything is finished and I even lost a lot of responsibility."

Of course Simon was aware of the pressure Woz had to face over the last few months. Being the only real technical backbone of the company led to the fact that pretty much any hard technical question had to be solved by him in the end. Hiring Gunpei Yokoi was only the start of Simon's strategy to slowly fill up the talent reserves of Atari.

"I have already spoken with Gunpei. He will invite some of his former colleagues from Japan in order to establish a quality control department within Atari. Furthermore we will start to slowly develop the technical parts of the arcade machine by ourselves. We will not touch the topic of chips, because this is simply not something we can afford to mess with currently.

But we can develop our own mainboard and even graphic cards. This is a concept I discussed with him as well. I think our future gaming machines will need a graphics card to specially increase the graphics of our games. He will start developing this project once he hires enough talents, but don't worry, he is solely responsible for this topic.

Your job in the future will shift more towards the software part. I need you to build up a team of game developers in the future. I know you cannot train creative minds, but they need to at least be able to follow instructions we give them in order to develop more games during a single year.

Once they have the skills to develop games within the team we can try and let them create their own games. But for now you should take a break for a month. Go on vacation and enjoy your time. I spoke to Dennis and he will pay your whole development team a nice bonus for the successful development of Tetris.``

Woz was very pleased with this new structure and happily accepted his bonus and new responsibility. After having a few more words with Simon he announced the news to his team and they decided to break up and enjoyed their vacation. Only a few people stayed in New York, who didn't want to leave their family anyway, in order to deal with any technical emergency. To be honest, Simon could fix any problems by himself with his superb skills alone, but he didn't want to leave the impression that his technical team should rely on him.