Curt Vendel (1966 - 2020) was the curator of the Atari Museum , author of Atari Inc.: Business is Fun and ATARI Corp. - Business Is War, as well the founder of Syzygy, a consumer electronics company.
Curt reached out to us, learning of our work with AtariAge and the home brew community at large, to request a custom, branded logo for an upcoming line of home arcade MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulation) cabinets titled Awesome Arcades . Our goal was to maintain a high level of classic gaming nostalgia reminiscent of arcades of the 80s but with a slightly updated modern appearance.
"Vendel was best known for his work documenting the history of Atari. He founded The Atari Museum in 1997, working with a number of former employees of the gaming company "to track down and recover as much of the lost history of Atari as possible.
An engineer by trade, Vendel's preservation efforts were not limited to an academic recounting of Atari's past. In the mid-2000s, his firm Legacy Engineering Group designed and manufactured the first two Atari Flashback plug-and-play retro consoles. According to the Centre for Computing History, Vendel was given just 10 weeks to design the original Flashback and the 20 ported games that would be included on it."
Historical Context Site