Retro books (or books about retro subjects) - everyone does it these days, you can find a ton of them around from self publishing houses. Usually good print quality and format, contents most of the times so-so, written by enthusiasts who aren't really good reporters or writers.
Instead, how about reading one of the first ones?
Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers was released back in 1997, as a bunch of HTML files in disk format, priced at $20 per copy. Its author, James Hague, an 80s programmer himself, idolised the people featured in the book, therefore he took good care in making interesting conversations which he then transcribed to the book. And, to our delight, a lot of them were using Ataris!
Adam Billyard, Danielle Berry, Chris Crawford, David Fox, Steve Hales, Archer MacLean, Jeff Minter, Philip Price. And then coin-op legends like Eugene Jarvis, Ed Rotberg. And foreward by John Romero. How many of those so called "Retro Books" can present such a lineup?
Since then James has kindly released the book for free and is hosting it on his website for quite some time now. A recommended read, head over to https://dadgum.com/halcyon/ and enjoy!
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If I may be so bold, I wholeheartedly recommend "britsoft" (https://readonlymemory.com/shop/book/britsoft-an-oral-history/)ย which is a in a similar vein and tracks the stories of legendary 8-bit games creators of the 80s.ย DONS!
I couldn't write it better, spot on. And unfortunately it applies also to Atari-related publications, fingers on just one handย ย (even with some buffer space ;)) would be enough to enumerate the really good ones.
And Inspiration for demo productions even:
"One trick that Charlie borrowed for "Rescue" was based on the physiology of the eye. When we see a bright flash of light, the iris closes down right afterwards, even though the flash is gone. This causes a momentary darkening of everything else. So in the game when we put up explosions or laser flashes, Charlie darkened the sky and terrain for a few frames to make the flashes seem brighter." (David Fox)